Of Clocks and Calendars
by Jericho Pryce
Summary: Here are three stories that span 300 years, yet are inextricably bound together. In each one, a fox and a rabbit find themselves bound together, fighting against the forces that seek to control Zootopia, and the lives of every animal within it.
1. This Crummy Old Future of Ours (Pt 1)

**{Of Clocks and Calendars}**

**A Zootopia Fan Fiction**

* * *

**Part One: Ray Guns and Roustabouts**

_"People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it."— Ray Birdbury_

_"When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."— Shearlock Holmes_

* * *

**01: This Crummy Old Future of Ours (June 21st, 2186 A.D.)**

* * *

**1.**

It was just past 0330 hours, and the city was as alive as it ever was. Candy-colored specks of pedestrians scrambled across the dewy, shimmering pavement, and a swarm of buzzing drones swam through the air-car traffic, carrying flickering visions of elegantly adorned animals and flashy fashion accessories to and fro through the city's tangled web of skyscrapers and shifting hovertrain rails.

One such advert depicted the fully three-dimensional image of a lithe lioness, smoothly swaying beneath the frame of unmistakable FringeTech logo that hovered above her. The lioness' fur was resplendent with rainbow hues that streaked from her head all the way down to the bit of leg that flashed from the seam of her dark dress; the colors shifted and swam with every tiny movement she made. Her irises, too, were smeared with gold flecks and a swathe of saffron hue, and they had the unmistakable mechanical sheen that denoted the so-called "stimplant" modifications that had taken Zootopia by storm over the past few years.

As the drone that carried her made its rounds through the Zootopian skyway, the lioness repeatedly bent her impossibly huge figure down towards the citizens below and said:"I'm Dahani, and thanks to the latest in FringeTech neuro-mods and stimplants, I was finally able to become my most perfect self, and now, you can too! Sync your Smart Cards to this advert and get signed up for a free consultation for you, or someone you love. FringeTech: Experience evolution!"

If one of the animals walking down on the street below were to gaze upward toward Ursa-Corp Tower and look especially close at that ad, they would possibly see how the lioness' eyes pulsed and swirled with an eerie rhythm. If they took a moment or two longer to really take in what they were seeing, they might even notice that the colors themselves seemed alive, thrumming in step with some private, silent song that only the lioness could hear.

What that passerby wouldn't see when they cast their eyes upward, however, was the lone figure who stood at the very top of the tower. In the visual cacophony of artificial light that blanketed the Zootopian skyline from dawn to dusk (as it had for as long as most anyone could remember), it was nearly impossible to make the out the figure of the fox as she teetered on the edge of the Tower's rooftop—even if the most keen eyed of predators climbed all the way up the tower to get a closer look, they would have only been able to catch the briefest glimpse of the fox's disembodied eyes: Two shining, emeralds orbs that floated above a nebulous form that wavered in and out of its shape like a desert mirage. After just a moment or two, even the eyes of this intangible ghost disappeared into the cloudy indigo swatches that made up what remained of Zootopia's night sky.

In fact, the technology that hid the fox from view shimmered and shifted in a manner not too unlike the rainbow fur of the Fringe-Tech lioness, only tonight this fox's purpose was antithetical to that of all those roving billboards.

Above all else, she was not to be seen.

The faint outline of a fox's tail flickered into view for split second, a shock of rust-tinged white against the polished chrome and glass of the building that almost immediately faded back into invisibility.

"You must be excited, Nora." The voice came not from outside, but from the neural up-link connected to the inside of the fox's helmet. The moment it spoke up, a little drone fluttered up next to her, seemingly from out of nowhere. It looked like a over-sized mechanical ladybug, complete with a mass of wires and softly-illuminated lenses that functioned as the eyes and ears, which tilted and posed to match up the voice that had just chimed in the fox's ear.

"I mean, I dunno much about long tails, myself," the voice continued, "but reliable sources have informed me that when they twitch like that, it means you're excited. Or nervous. Or does it just mean that you really have to take a leak?"

Nora flashed a glare at the bugbot hovering just a few feet from her face. "You know, Dallis," she said, "It could be that I'm just getting hungry thinking about how nice a plate of honey-glazed ham sounds right about now. Tell me, can that drone of yours tell if I'm drooling right now? Because that would be just too embarrassing." Nora did her best to spit out these words with an appropriately predatory growl, but the voice in her ear responded with the same snorting laugh that had become all too familiar with over the years.

"Yeah, yeah, killer. Save it for a pig that doesn't share an apartment with a wolf whose fangs are twice as big as yours. No offense." Nora was trying to think of a witty comeback to the pig's remark when another voiced popped into the conversation; it was much less surly, but just familiar.

"Dallis has been going on and on about my teeth lately, and I honestly have no idea why. My new flossing routine must really be doing the trick, eh?" The drone-bug jerked and flitted in the air as this second voice spoke, and Nora vividly imagined the sight of the pig sitting at his messy console, vainly wrestling for the controls to his invention.

"Brody? You're here too?" Nora sighed. "I thought this was supposed to be a covert op? Emphasis on 'covert'. Is the rest of the ZPD going to pop out from that stairwell over there to throw me a surprise party, too?" She could hear the wolf growling as he fought Dallis for the bugbot's controls, and watched in bemusement as the poor machine swirled back and forth in manic arcs.

"Oh...it's just...us...I...promise," Brody grunted, just as the drone finally settled into a calm concentric hover just a few feet from where Nora stood. "The Chief just wanted to make sure you had more than just one pair of eyes on the ground, even if it was just me helping Dallis on tech support. You know how she can get, considering how much our client has invested in this little stakeout of ours."

Nora was indeed familiar with how Chief Dasher felt about the way the Zootopia Police Department handled privately financed operations. It wasn't unusual for wealthy individuals and larger corporate entities to bankroll small ZPD task to tackle particularly thorny cases of espionage involving expensive intellectual-property. In the old days folks might have scoffed at the notion of cops having to go to such extreme measures to tackle "white collar crime", but the companies of a hundred-and-fifty years ago hadn't quite taken to recruiting stimplanted blackhat hackers and ex-ZPD guns-for-hire to do their dirty work. Ursa-Corp was one of the biggest movers and shakers when it came to shaping the law and public opinion of the land, even when they weren't writing obscene paychecks to fund specific missions like tonight's.

It had only been a couple of years since the city passed the Corporate Citizenry Act that, among many other things, allowed these private ops to be fully legalized and made known to the public, and already they'd already woven themselves into the fabric of the city's politics. If the team screwed things up, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine Mayor Canter deciding that the ZPD was in need of new, more effective leadership. For all of the things that Nora and Chief didn't see eye-to-eye on, the fox couldn't exactly begrudge her boss for wanting to keep her job.

Nora tapped a pressure point on the nape of the helmet she was wearing, forcing the visor of her helmet down and cloaking her eyes in the same active camouflage that cloaked the rest of her body. Immediately, her vision of the world was coated buzzing bluish tint as her HUD powered on and populated itself with a vitals readouts and digital charts measuring all of the data her suit could gather from her nearby environment, including all of the cameras and sensors hooked up throughout each and every one of the Tower's hundred-and-fifty stories. It was an overload of data that Nora could barely make sense of, but that's what her dynamic duo was there to help with.

"Alright then, boys," she said. "Tell me what I'm looking at. Any sign of those unwelcome house-guests the company has been getting all worked up about?" Dallis replied first, and when he spoke a handful of the data-streams in the visor's UI rearranged themselves to make room for a small square labeled VIDLINK - CLOVER. In it, Nora could see the speckled face of her porcine friend, coming in clear as crystal thanks to the boosted wireless signal coming from their drone friend. Dallis was surrounded by a mass of wires, spare parts and takeout containers; at the edges of the frame, Nora could just make out the fuzzy tail and broad shoulders of Brody Paddock, sitting at his own equally messy desk only a few feet away.

"From the looks of things," Dallis said, "activity both in and outside of the building has been consistent since the day workers clocked out earlier this evening. Outside of the handful of employees hanging around on the first few floors, everything's been quiet."

"Might you say it's...too quiet?" Nora let her joke hang in the air for a moment, prompting a dramatic eye-roll from Dallis - Nora even thought she saw the bugbot heave a tiny sigh of its own before it zipped away from her and across to the far side the Tower.

"No, Nora, I wouldn't say that," Dallis said. "It's regular quiet. The same kind of quiet our preliminary scans of the Tower's records have been picking up for the past two days now. Animals clock in, animals clock out. Nary a crumb goes missing in the meantime." The pig threw up his arms and spun lazily in his chair. "I'm beginning to think this whole mission is big fat waste of time."

"Now, now, Dallis" Brody chimed, leaning into frame to pat his partner's hoof, "Chief Dasher promised UC an on-site stakeout tonight, and Nora's wearing our finest counter-espionage couture for the occasion. Let's keep our eyes-peeled for just a bit longer." Brody offered Nora a wink as he returned to his station, and Dallis nodded begrudgingly.

"Fine. You man the drone then, Brody, and I'll keep and eye on Nora's data feed. If we get lucky, we might catch one of the night-workers sneaking someone else's leftovers from the staff lounge fringe. I'm sure the bigwigs at Ursa-Corp will be glad they paid us the big bucks when Jill from HR finally gets caught with her hoof in the cookie jar! In fact, we may have to start enforcing even stricter snacktime monitoring protocol in order to -"

"Hold on a sec." Nora cut Dallis off. "We just pinged something on floor 128. What is that?" The pig perked up in his chair, his hoofs working the keyboard with more dexterity than one might have thought possible for an animal that's been given such unwieldy digits to work with.

"A temperature spike, it looks like, though it's not coming from inside the building. It's registering from...the outside windows? Brody, get the drone over there."

"Roger", said Brody, and instantly Nora's entire HUD was filled in by the first person feed of the drone as it zipped down over twenty stories of the exterior of the Tower. It came to a sudden halt above two figures suspended from wires, hanging against the Tower's wall. Circles popped up on Nora's HUD and zoomed in on the infiltrators - One of them looked to be a wolf, based on his silhouette, while the other had the clear lineaments of a feline. Every part of them, from their ears to their tails, was clad in military grade tactical gear, though they obviously lacked the optical enhancements that Dallis and Brody had outfitted Nora's own suit with. The cat was busy affixing a small, blinking cylinder to the window she was perched on, but the wolf glanced up and caught the gaze of the drone, the artificial glow of his helmet's eyes shining in the camera's night-vision. The wolf reached for his side arm and fired three times at the robot, though Brody's sharp reflexes meant that the drone was able to dodge each of them.

The cat had taken notice by then, though, and she too had drawn a weapon and taken aim at the drone, though even through the fuzzy filter of her HUD, Nora could tell that there was something...off about this gadget. The cat fired, but the muzzle didn't so much flash as radiate light, as if someone had torn a hole of iridescent light right in the middle of the sky, and immediately the drone was plummeting through the air, Nora's vision obscured by an incomprehensible whirlwind of blurs, smears, and static. Brody grumbled curses under his breath, but in just a moment he was able to orient the machine a little as plunged down towards the street, and though the two figures were little more than specks by then, the camera was still able to catch the horizontal plume of smoke and flame that shattered the window of the tower's 128th floor.

"Nora!" Dallis exclaimed, "The elevators have been locked down and building security is locked out from the fiftieth story down. You need to get to floor 128, now!" Nora didn't need Dallis' panicking to know she only had seconds to make a plan. The stairs were a no go; even at a dead sprint, the intruders would be long gone by the time she worked her way down. Nora looked down at her paws and flexed her fingers - with the visor on, she could see past the camouflage, and she was reminded of the hard steel bristles that ran up and down the gloves she wore.

"Brody," Nora said, "How many field tests did you say you were able to run on the adhesive grips in these gloves?"

"Um, I didn't. I said we were going to run field tests now that your suit was ready for live operations, but it's never actually been used outside of our lab work."

"Yeah," Dallis added, although Nora could tell by the look in his eye that he already knew what she was planning to do. "Nora, we told you yesterday that you'd have to use the manual climbing gear if you wanted to-"

"Sorry guys, there's no time!" Nora retracted her visor before either the pig or the wolf could register any further complaints, letting herself enjoy the cool night breeze as it hit her eyes for exactly one second. "Dallis...if I die...I want you to know it's all your fault. And also, give Brody all of my stuff."

Then, before she could give herself any more time to think, Nora dropped from the edge of the tower, both of her paws scraping against the tower's glass and metal facade. She immediately felt the sickening tug of gravity in her gut, and for a split-second Nora really did feel like might just keep falling, down and down until she made a messy handshake with the concrete below. This was an almost comical thought, given the exceptionally loud squeaking noise her paws made as she descended.

_So much for stealth,_ Nora thought.

Then she felt and heard the soft hum of the magnets and electrically charged friction spikes in her gloves kick in, and she thankfully came to a halt some two stories below the roof. Nora tried to stifle the sigh of relief bubbling up in her throat, but Brody and Dallis made up for it with their half-terrified, half-jubilant cries of "Oh thank goodness" and "Dammit Fox, don't scare me like that!"

Nora was sure that in spite of their dramatics, the two had plenty of data they wanted to collect, but they thankfully kept their scientific curiosity in check. There was a job to do, after all, and it had already been a full twenty seconds or so since the mystery figures had blown a hole in the other side of the building. They could afford to waste no more time.

"Alright," Dallis said, "You're just above floor 147 right now. You just need to slide down to 128 and make your way inside."

"Right," Nora replied. She flexed her paws to loosen the grip of the gloves and slid silently down the remaining nineteen stories, perching just outside of the 128th story. From inside, Nora could make out the shadowy outlines of the two perpetrators on the other side of the glass. Unfortunately Nora's optical camouflage shorted out when the magnets in the gloves kicked in ( a design flaw that she was sure her friends would be kicking themselves over for days), which meant that anyone who cared to look could see Nora too. If the drone was still buzzing around, Dallis and Brody would have been able to see their friend's tail swishing wildly in excitement. "Thank goodness for small favors," Nora muttered, drawing one of her pistol and aiming it at a nearby glass panel.

"Nora, what was that?" Dallis' tone was one of resigned exasperation, but Nora was already pulling the trigger. The pistol had a built in silencer, but the crash of bullet to glass was still quite loud, and Nora had to shield her face from the resulting spray of glass shards that flew every which way. High-tech suit or no, her entrance was bound to be noticed.

Thankfully, Nora was perfectly fine with that.


	2. This Crummy Old Future of Ours (Pt 2)

**2\. **

The cat was skulking through the cubicles and computer terminals of the 128th floor, towards the gash in the window that Nora had created, while the wolf made for next door in a row of twenty tightly packed of office modules that separated the floor's west half from its east. you're Of the twenty offices Nora could see, the pair of prowlers had already made short work of almost half of them; the doors had all been kicked in or blasted apart, and the contents of the offices had been strewn all over the ground. Heaps of broken tablets and monitors littered the walkway, and there was even a fair amount of paper strewn about.

The company must have been exceptionally paranoid about keeping their files and figures away from prying eyes. Paper was expensive stuff these days, and the only reason to keep physical copies of files around was to make sure that information could only trade hands when it was _literally _being passed from one set of paws to another. The wolf kicked down the door of the eleventh module, while the cat playfully scraped her claws against the jagged fragments of window left behind from Nora's not-so-subtle entrance.

"We know you're in here, you know" the cat purred. "There's no point in hiding. I can _smell _that you're close. Just come on out so we can really _play." _Nora hid patiently behind the flimsy wall of a cubicle that was within spitting distance of where the cat was now tracing her path. In truth, the cat was almost certainly bluffing. Dallis and Brody had put a lot of work into making sure her suit dampened any olfactory emissions that could prove a liability in the field. In Dallis' own words, the keenest-nosed enemy would be more likely to track pick up the scent of a gassy field mouse than Nora, even from a few feet away. At the time, Nora was most concerned with how Dallis' could possibly have the data to back up such a weirdly specific example (he refused to comment), but right now she was more than happy to not look a gift pig in the mouth. Despite the boasting, Nora could tell by the cat's cautious gait and the slow, even pauses between her footsteps that she was relying more on her ears than her nose to track her prey. So far, she was proving unsuccessful.

Nora could pick up her foe's scent just fine, however. The feline carried with her the musky combination of sweat and adrenaline, along with a sour, unidentifiable stink that hung in the air like a cloud, like burning plastic that had been drenched in vinegar. She thought: _Is that smell...coming from her gun? _

"Quit messing around, Dee," the wolf growled, as he tossed yet another cracked monitor onto the ground. "In and out, remember? The boss wants the drop-off ready in twenty. Just kill the cop and help me find it, would ya?"

"Oh, you're _no fun,_ Jay," sighed the cat, "But I suppose you're right."

_Dee?_ _Jay?_ Either the two really liked club music, or they were using the letters as codenames. The cat called "Dee" slowed her pacing just on the other side of the cubicle Nora was hiding behind. "Okay, copper, you heard the big guy. I'll give you three seconds to come out, okay? After that, though, I'll have to start making a scene. And we don't want that, do we?"

Nora held her pistol close to her face, her paw so close to her face that she could have numbered the fur on her fingers. The cat's hazy reflection was visible in the glass of one of the office doors across the way. Nora watched as the smeary figure took one slow, deliberate step, and then another. Getting closer.

"One…" whispered the cat.

There was the soft scrape of steel as the cat drew her strange firearm. In the glass, the reflection was taking on a much more solid shape. Nora could just make out its perked up ears, and the tail that swished playfully from side to side .

"Two…" The cat stopped. Her reflection cocked its head and let devilish grin drip from its lips. The white pinpricks of its eyes were trained on the toppled crook of cubicles that Nora was crouched behind. The reflection raised its weapon up almost casually, straight to the left. Nora's shifted her gaze slowly upward, and she could just barely make out the dim green glow of the weapon's muzzle. The acrid battery stench that came with it immediately made her nose twitch and her eyes water, even through her mask.

_'Super,' _Nora thought, digging in her heels and twisting her body backwards.

"Hey there," sneered the cat, as she pulled the trigger.

In the moment or two before the gun fired, the air around Nora's face became burning hot, the atmosphere shrinking and swelling like the skin of a water-balloon that was just about to burst. Then, just as swiftly, everything snapped back into place, and a blinding jet of solid red light sliced through the layers of wood, metal, and plastic that separated the cat with the crazy gun and the fox who was currently trying to not get deep-fried.

Nora slammed into the side of another cubicle wall and quickly dashed to a nearby hiding place. She knew that the cat could see in the dark well enough to track her once she'd been spotted, so the jig was up on the stealthy approach. As she clung to the wall, gripping her pistol tight enough to make her fingers ache, Nora desperately hoped that the cat's gadget had a recharge time that it had to burn through before going off again.

_That's how ray-guns always work in the VR games, right? _In that moment, Nora herself wishing she'd spend less time churning through the decidedly less tech-savvy mystery sims she loved so much.

Through the crackling of burning office supplies and the dim ring that filled her ears, Nora heard the soft digital hum of her communication channel kicking back in.

"Nora, we...barely see what's going...but...heard….hell of a racket! Are...alright?" Brody's frantic voice was chopped and garbled through a film of white noise, which Nora guessed was a by-product of whatever was coming out of the cat's fancy toy. Before Nora could try to respond, though, she caught the rustling of paper and debris across the ground off to her left, on the other side of the main row of offices. Nora could distinctly mark the positions of the cat and the wolf, who were both making their way to her, which meant this new sound must have come from a third source.

There was someone else on the floor with them.

Nora gritted her teeth. This was bad. The team had only clocked the two current intruders before the lockdown shut everyone else out of the normal entrances and exits, and a professional smash-and-grab job like this would only demand a pair of thieves at the most. Nora's team had been told all of the company employees were assigned to the first thirty floors during the night hours, so either the company had given ZPD bad intel, and some poor janitor or corporate go-getter was trapped in the middle of a firefight, or someone else was sneaking around where they didn't belong.

"Nora!" That was Dallis, though Nora had to strain to hear him. The interference was getting worse. "Nora, if you don't...another five seconds...calling in the calv...!" The static cut the pig off, but Nora didn't have time to respond; she couldn't risk another one of those ray blasts if a civilian was potentially in the line of fire.

Instead, she turned out of her hiding spot to greet the two that were advancing on her head on, training her pistol on the cat while the two aimed their weapons in kind. The cat's gun was a shiny, ergonomic device that really did look like something straight out of an old science-fiction rag, though Nora was happy to see that the wolf held a plain 9mm, probably the same model as her own.

_So they only have one._ _That's good to know. _

"Take another step, fox, and you're dead." Nora could hear the sneer that the wolf known as "Jay" was wearing underneath his mask. "It's two-on-one, and in case you didn't notice, we've got a trick or two up our sleeve to boot."

The cat chuckled. "Yeah, we figured we'd run into some trouble, but we didn't think the ZPD would be stupid enough to just end in _one _cop. I'm honestly a little disappointed. I was looking forward to testing this thing out on a squad car or two. Maybe even one of those fancy APCs you guys love to bust out when those pesky protesters get out of hand."

"Don't worry," Nora said, loudly, hoping that her words were coming through to her friends on the other side. "I've got back-up on the way. They'll be here in just a minute or two. Though you won't be firing that thing again. Dead or alive, you're coming with me."

"_RoboHOUND _?" said Jay, " _Really? _We've got the most advanced weaponry in the world aimed right at your fuzzy little head, and the best you can do is quote dumb movies from two hundred years ago?"

"Hey now, don't be judgmental. That movie is a classic—it's what made me want to become a cop in the first place, you know. Well, that one and _BatFox. _The good one, also from way back when, with Michael Kitten. Gotta love, superheroes, am I right?"

"I never had any patience for the old flatfilms," said the wolf. "Always struck me as a waste of time if I couldn't feel it in SEN/SATE."

"A VR snob, huh?" Nora said. "Well, that settles it. Now I _really _need to arrest you."

The three of them were standing stock still, their weapons not once wavering from each other's eye lines. The charred remains of the nearby furnishings popped and crackled with flame. A cracked ceiling tile fell and split in two, trailing a cloud of dust and insulation in the air above it.

"Alright, Dee, let's wrap this up," said Jay, his voice growing impatient. "The drop-off is in a half hour, and you're hide'll be the first I come after if we don't get paid for this crap." He motioned to a small, metallic box he held in his paw. It was a hard drive; the side facing Nora was even decorated with the Ursa-Corp logo: the etching of an angular, stylized paw-print emblazoned in a ring of fire and electricity. The symbol was smack in the middle between the two patches of frayed wiring that had once connected it the computer the wolf had just finished busting apart.

"Sorry, foxy," Dee said, sounding almost disappointed that her game had to end. "Nobody's getting locked up tonight. Not us, at least. You, on the other hand, might have to be shut up in one of those metal drawers they have down _the coroner's office." _The cat offered Nora a wicked, toothy grin, and Nora watched as the muzzle of the cat's weapon began to hum and glow that awful phosphorescent green.

Behind Dee, Nora caught a swift flash of moving shadow, a shape she could just barely make out through the smoke and dust. She really hoped that neither of her opponents caught the sound of it scurrying amidst the crackling of the debris and their own self-satisfied chortling.

"Any last words?" Dee asked. Nora took a moment to dig through her mental repository of comebacks and one-liners, but before she could respond, a fourth voice cried out from behind the cat:

_"Yeeargh! _"

Nora had just enough time to savor Jay and Dee's dumbstruck reactions as the rabbit who had just leapt out of the shadows brought the fire extinguisher down on the cat's head - it collided with a weighty _thonk _, and both the cat and her weapon crashed to the ground. The rabbit followed shortly thereafter, landing smack in the middle of the triangle formed by Nora, the wolf, and the cat, the latter of whom was writhing in pain on the floor and cradling her fresh head wound. The reddish-brown hare landed with surprising grace, all things considered, though Nora thought her tattered business attire looked comically out of place amidst the fully armed mercenaries and the cop in the high-tech stealth suit - or maybe it was the other way around? The wolf cried out in angry shock, and the rabbit looked to be just as dismayed - her violet eyes grew large with concern at the sight of the blood seeping through the cat's fingers.

"Oh my God, I'm so sorry!" she cried out, dropping the now dented fire extinguisher to the ground. "I thought that would just knock you out! Please don't die!" The rabbit's feet shuffled as she danced with uncertainty, clearly stuck between the desire to help the creature she had just thoroughly concussed and the instinctual drive to avoid ending up on the wrong side of the furious woman's claws.

Dee spasmed in venomous and nearly incoherent fury. Through the sputtering and hissing, the cat managed to choke out a few intelligible words: "_Tear. You. APART!" _

Jay moved to train his pistol on the frightened rabbit, but Nora was faster. She fired two shots - the first blasted the pistol right out of his paw, and the second hit him in the shoulder. Considering the thickness of his body armor, this wasn't enough to send him flying, but it staggered him enough for Nora to connect a hard right punch straight to his jaw.

The wolf was quick, and he managed to snatch Nora's left arm and slam it into the jagged section of nearby broken cubicle - the pain was sharp, even through Nora's suit, and as her hand jerked back, her gun went flying out into the air, landing across the room and skidding into the shadows beneath some anonymous workstation .

Jay, still tightly gripping Nora's wrist, reared back his free arm for another blow. Nora quickly dug her foot into the same wall that pinned her arm and pushed herself up in a twisting arc; she used this momentum to wrap her right thigh around the wolf's neck and bring his face slamming into the wall. She landed face down on her now free paw and twisted herself upright once more to pin the wolf's chest to the ground.

She brought her fist down onto his spine, and with a flick of her wrist, a current came surging through out of the metal contact points of her glove's knuckles. 60,000 volts of white-hot electricity sent the wolf's body into a spasm that immediately knocked him out cold.

"Um, excuse me? Officer?" The rabbit's whimper brought Nora's attention to staggering feline whose claws and vicious glare were now trained upon her diminutive prey and glistening with murderous intent. When Dee spoke, the sardonic glee and the piercing rage had dripped away from her lips; it had been replaced with a dim, raspy monotone that Nora found even more unnerving.

"Dumb little bunny," she said. "For that, I'm gonna kill you slow. And I'm gonna make you _watch._" The goggles from the cat's mask has been knocked askew by the bunny's earlier sneak attack, and Nora could see the pupil of her one gleaming yellow eye had been drawn close into an almost imperceptible slit. The rabbit's nose was twitching furiously in panic as she cast her own pleading gaze to Nora.

The stun-charge in the glove still had thirty seconds left to recharge, her sidearm was gone, and Nora figured that by the time she either waited for a new stun charge or ran to grab her pistol, the cat would have made mincemeat of her new friend, and that would just be rude. She jumped forward and tackled cat, grappling her arm just as it was raised to slice the rabbit to ribbons. The pair rolled across the floor, tussling for a moment before the cat, who was shockingly nimble for someone suffering from a serious concussion, managed to gain the upper hand and pin Nora to the ground. Nora raised her arms, bracing for the impact of the cat's claws, when a searing bright light flooded the room, accompanied by the telltale whisper-slick whirring of one of the ZPD's drones, though the machine that was hovering just outside was significantly larger than the bug that had been shot down earlier.

Chief Dasher's voice boomed out through the din: "_You have ten seconds to lower your claws and surrender to the ZPD! We will not be asking you again. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may potentially be used against you in criminal court." _The Chief's signature growl was given an extra dose of gravitas through the mechanical filter of the drone's speakers, and the sharp blue crackling of the two stun cannons protruding from its underside. "You_ are under arrest for conspiring and carrying out a scheme of corporate terrorism, and for attempted grand theft of Ursa-Corp's intellectual property, as defined and protected by the Zootopian Bill of Corporate Rights." _This was a recent addendum to the usual reading of rights, and Nora thought she could detect just a hint of bitterness in the way Dasher recited them.

Dee hissed at the encroaching drone and cast a final, spiteful glare down at Nora. Nora responded by snapping the visor of helmet up so she could give the cat a wink and thumbs-up. Dee cursed and bolted up off Nora and back towards the other side of the office. Nora pursued her, and there was another big drone buzzing in the hole that Jay and Dee had busted into the wall, its stun cannons ready to deliver a crippling double-dose of electrical discharge.

Dee didn't falter for even a second - she jumped into the air at the exact moment the cannons jettisoned their probes into the ground where she had been standing just a second before. Her feet landed on top of the drone and she took a final leap out into the busy Zootopian airways. Nora caught up just in time to see her plummet for a second or two before a foreboding, jet-black vehicle came zipping out from the other side of a building across the way. Dee landed on top of it and ducked into the open passenger door with a grace that Nora found both infuriating and undeniably impressive. The car quickly fell further and further down, disappearing into the horde of aircar traffic that filled out all of the empty spaces between the skyline's dreamy twilight afterglow.

"_Nora? You okay?" _It was Dallis' voice her ear again, clear as crystal now. _"Your suit's feedback protocols all are all shot to hell, and we haven't heard a peep from you." _

"Yeah, Dallis, I copy, and I'm fine. We've got one of them here to bring in, but his partner got away - took an express route out the window to catch a ride that was waiting for her. "

It was Brody's turn to chime in. "_Dasher already has three different teams scouring the city for them. They'll turn up. What's important is that they didn't turn you into a flambé. Dallis would never admit it, but he'd be totally broken up if anything happened to you on his watch." _

"_Only because she's wearing the world's lone prototype for our new stealth tech," _Dallis chuckled. _"It'd be months' worth of research up in smoke! Though I guess it would be nice to keep Nora around too. It'd be a damn pain to teach a newbie how to operate it all over again." _

Nora smiled. "Well, it's good to know at least _someone _appreciates what I bring to the ZPD. I'll catch up with you two in the debriefing - Nora out." She pressed the button to silence her comms and removed her helmet. The past ten minutes had felt like hours, and Nora took the chance to take in a moment or two of peace, relishing the cold breeze as it blew through her fur.

The rabbit strode up and stood next to Nora, also admiring the view of the city. Even through all of the broken class and the red-and-blue glare of the ZPD drone's sirens, it was a striking sight.

"So," she said, "is this a typical night on the beat for you, officer?"

Nora laughed. "Oh, you mean sneaking into corporate offices so I can have mercenaries shoot at me with laser guns? That only happens maybe once or twice a week. Usually I'm on donut duty."

"You didn't happen to bring any of the kinds with jam in them, did you? Those are my favorite, and after tonight, I think I could eat a whole box on my own." The rabbit paused, and then added, "Thank you, by the way. For saving my life, I mean. My name is Juno Mori."

"Well, Miss Mori, I'm Agent Nora Khatri of the Zootopia Police Department, Special Operations Unit, and you don't need to thank me; I was just returning the favor. After all, you're the one who took on a psychotic cat three times your size - though I have to wonder what exactly you were doing here, on the restricted floor of a locked down office building that belongs to a company I can only assume you don't actually work for?" Juno cast her vivid violet eyes down at that, as she nervously kicked at bits of drywall that were scattered about the floor.

"Oh, well, about that. You see, I'm something of a...well, I'm a journalist, and I was investigating a tip one of my old friends gave me about some of the company's shady business dealings. I didn't know things were going to get all..." The rabbit gestured towards the general mess about the place.

"Absurdly, life-threateningly dangerous?" Nora continued.

"I was going to say 'wacky', but that works too," Juno said, winking.

"Do you have a Smart Card I can scan, to prove you are who you say you are?" Nora asked. Juno's ears perked-up and immediately drooped back down a little - a telltale sign of rabbit anxiety. She made a show of patting her sides and giving a resigned - but not entirely convincing - shrug.

"I must have left behind. Sorry. You guys can just print me one or something, though, can't you?" Juno and Nora both knew perfectly well that every single animal in Zootopia had their prints and DNA logged in the city's databases from the moment the doctors got done snipping their umbilical cords; getting and ID for the rabbit wasn't the issue. It wasn't _technically _illegal to go around without a Smart Card on hand, though it would be before too long if big spenders like FringeTech and Ursa-Corp had their way of it. Still, Juno had to understand how less-than-kosher it looked for the sole civilian witness to a supposedly top-secret espionage mission to just so happened to be lacking any kind of immediately verifiable identification.

"We'll put a pin in that one, for later", I guess, Nora said. Deciding to change the subject, she asked, "That old friend you mentioned? Did they come from here, at Ursa-Corp? Or are they an outside source?"

"That would be telling, now wouldn't it?" Juno flashed Nora a smile that was just too irresistibly cute, though Nora made another mental note, reminding herself of how many of the smaller mammals still bristled when "non-cute" animals made use of the word. Just in case it came up in conversation, later.

"I appreciate your journalistic integrity, Miss Mori though I'm probably still going to need to take you in for questioning. Just as soon as I clean up some of my mess, that is." Nora strode over to where Jay's unconscious body lay and bent to grab the precious hard drive he had been carrying, though she couldn't spot it in the immediate vicinity, though she could have sworn she saw it topple out of the wolf's paw when she'd bull-rushed him. Nora barely restrained herself from jumping when she felt the _tap-tap-tap _of the rabbit's fingers on her back; she turned to see Juno sheepishly holding the small slate colored drive up to her.

"Sorry," she said, "I grabbed it on instinct when the guy dropped it. I figured it should probably go to you though, right? Since it's evidence, and all?"

Nora plucked the drive from Juno's hand and dropped it into an evidence baggy that she clipped to her belt.

"You know it's not smart to sneak up on a ZPD officer like that, right?" Nora quipped.

"True," Juno replied, "though it's not like I could do anything to match the ninja moves you put on the Big Bad Bozo over here. That was like something out of those Maretrix movies, or something."

Nora was already starting to like this rabbit. _'Damn. Am I really that easy?' _she thought.

She didn't say anything to Juno, though, choosing instead to make her way over a few feet and wordlessly fish through the rubble on the floor. It took a minute, but she eventually managed to snag the fancy laser gun that had almost barbecued the whole office just a few minutes ago. Nora allowed herself a few seconds to regard the weapon's sleek, bizarre construction with unbridled curiosity before wrapping it in another airtight baggy that she holstered to her side.

"Alright then," Nora said, finally, "That takes care of things on my end. Miss Mori, I would very much appreciate it if you would allow me to escort you back to ZPD headquarters. We can get your ID all checked out, and I'm sure my boss would rather have you explain the rest of your story in a setting that wasn't quite so much on fire."

"Wait a minute," Juno said, her nose beginning to wriggling with nervousness. "I'm not under arrest, am I?"

"That all depends, Miss Mori. Why?" Nora effortlessly shifted both her face and her voice into the stone-faced Serious Cop persona that she'd been perfecting over the years. "_ Should you be_?" At this, Juno's ears started doing that perky-droopy thing again, and Nora almost felt bad for teasing her.

"Look," Nora said, easing up again, "I can't promise that my superiors are going to be in love with the whole "trespassing on corporate property, gaining potentially unlawful access to trademarked data and IP, anddirectly involving yourself with a covert ZPD bust" situation. They tend to frown on that kind of stuff. But, seeing as you saved my life and all, I'll do what I can to put in a good word for you."

Nora gave the rabbit a wink just as the elevators started whirring and humming back to life behind her. After just a few seconds, two of the doors on the far wall split open, and six ZPD officers came marching out of them. Each of the officers came equipped with their own small drones flying behind them, and they all quickly began locking down the crime scene. Nora motioned Juno to the open elevator doors, though she still looked uncertain.

"Also," Nora added, "I can provide my incredibly official guarantee as an agent of the ZPD that I will split a jam donut with you once we get there. As thanks for your cooperation, and also for the whole 'saving my skin' bit." Juno contemplated the offer for a moment.

"Alright, officer," she said, "I'll come along, but only if the jam is raspberry flavored. I'm allergic to blueberries, and strawberries make me nauseous. I wouldn't want to end up barfing all over your shiny police station floors."

As unprofessional as it might have been to laugh along with a possible suspect in an ongoing corporate espionage investigation, Nora couldn't help herself. "Roger. Raspberry jam it is, then." Nora ushered Juno toward the elevator. As the rabbit joined her and the elevator doors closed behind the pair, Norra added: "I have to confess, Miss Mori: I was really hoping you'd go for the blueberry flavor. Blueberry has always been my favorite."


	3. This Crummy Old Future of Ours (Pt 3)

**3\. **

It was only a few minutes' flight back to headquarters from the tower. Judging by the way the rabbit's nose and feet wouldn't stop twitching about as the ZPD transport they rode in ducked and weaved through layers of sky-traffic, Nora guessed that the little journalist was positively dying to ask her questions, but Juno didn't say a word. Nora appreciated her new companion's composure; the short jaunt from the Tower to headquarters was brief, but it was also the most time Nora was going to have all evening to take in the quiet, and to reflect on everything that had happened. Earlier, when Nora had been looking down from her watchful perch, the smudgy mass of Zootopia's eternal lightscape had seemed cloudy and unreal, like looking at the city through the foggy film an old, physical photograph that hadn't developed right. The aircar had brought Nora and Juno into the thick of that vibrant neon haze, now, and there was an almost physical weight to the pinks, blues, and greens that bled through the car's narrow windows.

This wasn't the first operation Nora had been a part of that had thrown some curve-balls her way, of course - it was a messy line of work she was in, and any mission that got them even one step closer to closing a case was usually considered a net positive, in her eyes at least, if not necessarily the higher-ups'. In the end, the all-important data-drive had been secured, which _was_ Ursa-Corp's top priority, and Nora was also fairly certain that Dallis and Brody would be more than a little excited to get their paws on the laser-powered death machine she'd nabbed from the cat. There was even a half-conscious wolf landing right on the ZPD's doorstep that was ripe for interrogation; Nora wondered if she would even be allowed to take part in the shakedown this time.

Growing up, playing the whole "good cop/bad cop" bit was a huge part of what drew her into joining the force in the first place – those scenes were always her favorite parts of the old cop movies she watched with her father. Lately, though, Nora, along with the force's other agents and detectives, had been playing a smaller role in the post-arrest interviews, especially when a suspect's guilt was all but certain. AI-driven Forced Interrogation Units were becoming more and more prominent, especially since the IP Laws had started to cascade through Zootopia's legislature, and so much of the ZPD's work became driven by corporate contracts.

They were quick, clean, and had a borderline perfect success rate, which was more than Nora could put down on her resume, and she knew it. It didn't make the shift away from real, snout-to-the-grindstone detective work any less disappointing, though.

A glance down at her sleeve's info-screen told her that it was only 04:03 AM - barely half an hour had passed since she had first leapt from the roof of Ursa-Corp Tower. Wasn't that how it always went with operations like these? Days of meticulous planning and preparation, all thrown into the air and distilled into a few chaotic minutes of improvisation, recklessness, and a bit of dumb luck. Brody had a special name for the way Nora tended to get in and out of most sticky situations: "Khatri's Razor", which he said was a principle that stated: "The most ridiculous, unpredictable, and needlessly reckless approach is what will probably happen no matter what anyone else says, so you might as well plan for the worst".

Nora might roll her eyes whenever Khatri's Razor came up, but she wasn't about to argue that it was _entirely _unfair, either. Last month, a raid on a warehouse front used by illegal stimplant smugglers resulted in a fire that spread across half a city block (though how was Nora supposed to have predicted that an elephant would ever have wanted a flame-thrower grafted to the inside of his trunk?). Now, there was some kind of ninja-cat running around Zootopia with millions of dollars of corporate IP data stashed along whatever other science-fiction guns she just happened to have lying around. Nora wondered whether or not she should be concerned over how blasé such SNAFUs had become.

This case was different, though; it went beyond the scope of usual corporate crime, and collecting only one of the two thieves responsible for one of the most literally explosive cases of IP espionage ever would not be enough; not for Ursa-Corp, not for Chief Dasher, and not for herself. In Zootopia, a missing spy with potentially destructive knowledge of the city's most closely guarded trade secrets wasn't so much a loose end as it was a time bomb just waiting to go off, and the real job wouldn't be done until Ursa-Tech got back what was stolen from them, including whatever priceless secrets were rattling around in that crazy cat's head.

She eyed Juno, sitting across from her, her tawny feet still dancing this way and that as she traced the streaks of neon outside the window with her big violet eyes. The first thing any cop did when digging their claws into an investigation was to look for pieces that didn't fit the way they were meant to. A precocious little journalist who just so happened to sneak into a well-guarded tech office on the night of a major heist? That was some nonsense ripped straight out of a dumb old spy flick.

_Well, even more so than usual,_ Nora thought. Either way, the rabbit clearly wasn't dumb - she had to know that the ZPD wasn't going to let her story go without them asking her a few questions to straighten out the details.

Juno's eyes didn't stray from the outside lights, but her ears turned ever so slightly toward Nora, and the fox wondered if the rabbit had somehow _heard_ that Nora was puzzling her over.

Breaking the silence, Juno said, "I always pictured the inside of one of these things to be...I don't know. Scarier? I travel using the Underground mostly, too – aircars always seemed too…chaotic, the way they're always zipping about up above us, around and over each other like a bunch of months all heading for a different flame. This has actually been pretty nice, though, maybe that's just because I'm comparing it to the whole 'almost dying' thing from a few minutes ago."

"There's nothing to be scared of," Nora said, "FringeTech has made sure that the ZPD always travels in style. Our transports are top of the line, real primo stuff. Even if we did hit someone up here, they'd bounce off of us like raindrops off a rhino's butt." As Juno settled back in, Nora saw that her nose was still twitching. Nora continued: "Unless, when you say 'scared', you mean because I'm a cop, and you're not?" Juno didn't respond, but the way she shifted her feet together spoke volumes. This girl was either very bad at hiding her emotions, or very good at showing off exactly what she wanted people to see.

"Like I said, Miss Mori," Nora said, "you aren't under arrest; you're just being escorted back to headquarters so you can help piece together whatever information you might have that we at the ZPD don't. It'll make tracking down that psycho ninja that much easier in the long run, and take it from me: Talking with the Chief one-on-one will save you a lot of time filling out paperwork." Nora gave a mock shudder of horror, and Juno laughed.

"Sure," Juno said. "And I'm happy to help, of course. You still can't blame a girl for being nervous in this sort of situation, though. I'm used to writing articles about low-income housing and job scarcity; if I'm lucky, I might get to interview the Mayor's Deputy Vice-Chief of Corporate Citizen's Relations for a few minutes before they blow me off for a game of virtual water polo. Explosions and fist fights are somewhat beyond my expertise, not to mention being 'escorted' by a super cop in a robot suit who is on the payroll of the most powerful entity in all of Zootopia."

Juno was still keeping a conversational tone, though Nora caught the faint spark of sarcasm in the word 'escorted', and it wasn't hard to spot the undercurrent of carefully managed intrigue in the rabbit's voice her voice.

"I've been keeping tabs on the stories, you know," she said, "Especially with all of the IP Laws that have been passing through lately. People have been sued into total bankruptcy, or charged with corporate felony, or both, just because they didn't dot there I's and cross their T's exactly how the corporate suits wanted them to. A few people have even disappeared completely, if you believe the word that's been going around. If the cops can use technology to turn themselves invisible so they can fight corporate ninjas with laser guns, who's to say what else is going on in Zootopia that us regular citizens are being kept in the dark about?"

Nora was impressed with how quickly their chat had transitioned into an informal interview; she was even beginning to suspect that Juno didn't much mind the opportunity to have a ZPD agent all to herself like this. Yes, Nora believed that the anxiety in Juno's eyes was very real; fear in animals like her was exceptionally hard to fake for a fox with senses as sharp as Nora's, or so she wanted to believe. As real as that fear was, though, it could also just as well be one of the many tools a resourceful journalist could rely on every now and again to get the scoop she was after.

"Miss Mori," Nora said, "I'm not going to pretend that I love Ursa-Corp, or FringeTech, or any of the other companies that help pay my bills any more than you do. They're in it for their profit margins, and their bonuses, and all of the good PR that money can buy, and personally speaking? I haven't met one cop that's dumb enough not to figure that out for themselves. We're all just cogs in a machine, and all that. An impossibly huge and apathetic machine; a machine that breaks down way too often, and doesn't always work the way it should; a machine made out of crummy rules and crummy regulations, and it chews up and spits out any animal that's unlucky enough, or stupid enough, to get their fur caught in the teeth of the gears." Juno's eyes were still wide, but focused, and her ears were fixed directly on Nora, who was certain that the rabbit was committing every this entire conversation to memory, just in case.

"And of course, Miss Mori, nobody on the top of the food chain is shedding tears when this happens, because that's just the way the machine works, after all, which is to say that it _doesn't _work. We just go along with it, because what else are we supposed to do?" Nora paused, partially for effect – Juno wasn't the only one who knew how to play up the drama for an audience – and partially because she wanted to make sure she got the next part right. It had been a long time since she'd been comforted by this particular sentiment, and even longer still since she'd voiced it aloud to another person.

"I can tell you this, though: We're living in the 22nd century, and even in this crummy old future of ours, I want to believe that there's still good to be done. It doesn't matter how much cash is lining the companies' coffers; I won't accept a world where someone can just get away with…well, with murder. The thing about a broken machine is that it _can_ be fixed. We just need to find the right parts, and someone who can put them back together."

Nora watched Juno carefully, and though her twitching nose and alert ears relaxed somewhat as she nestled back down into her seat, Nora couldn't quite tell what she was feeling. Juno's ambiguous expression could have read as wistful, resigned, amused, or even a little sly. For a fox to be giving a rabbit credit for her slyness was a small absurdity that Nora felt was the perfect cherry to put on top of the ice-cream sundae of weirdness that was this whole night.

"So, Officer Khatri," Juno said. "Is that why you got into this line of work? To be the cog that finally fixes the machine?" Nora had to laugh at how the question felt both like an earnest query and a backhanded compliment at the same time. She was really starting to like this rabbit.

"To tell you the truth, it wasn't even my bit. Someone much smarter and more optimistic than me has been using the "Fix the machine" routine for years, trying to get me to feel better about, well, all of _this_." Nora motioned to the endless ribbons of neon and glimmering steel that had been zipping past them from the moment the transport took flight.

"So, the whole 'karate chopping the bad guys and blowing up office equipment' thing? Is that your way of fixing things?"

Nora shrugged. "It's the same as your articles, I guess. I don't know how much good it's all for, in the end, but it has to count for something, right?"

Juno didn't have anything to say to that one, but brow furrowed in thought. Before Nora could ask what Juno was pondering, the transport swerved and jerked, beginning its descent from the skyway to the landing pads of ZPD Precinct Zone D-19. Officer Tasana, the gruff zebra who had been in charge of ferrying the two of them back to headquarters, banged her hoof on the glass viewport from the driver's seat as her voice buzzed over the comms.

"Khatri, we're here. The Chief is waiting." Juno started a bit in her seat, and Nora stood first, offering a paw for Juno to steady herself with as the car landed with a soft _thud_. The vehicle's landing struts hissed and steadied themselves, though they jostled again when Tasana climbed out and opened rear doors. Immediately, Nora and Juno were met with the stony, spotted face of Chief Dasher, who was flanked by Tasana, Dallis and Brody too. Apparently, the two technicians just couldn't wait to get their hands on the brand on the evidence Nora had tucked under her arm. The barely restrained wolfish glee that sparked in Brody's eyes as she offered him the evidence bag was a cozy sight that Nora was happy to indulge.

Though Chief Dasher wasn't the tallest animal of the bunch, her lean figure cut an imposing silhouette in the rain, and she towered above Juno, who the Chief regarded with an inscrutable stare that Nora knew all too well. Juno, obviously, wasn't as prepared for the cheetah's unwelcoming countenance, though Nora was impressed at Juno's composure in this stare down. There wasn't even a hint of the uncertainty she had exhibited during the flight over.

"Juno Mori, is it?" Chief Dasher said, taking just a few steps closer. "I'm Chief Dasher of the Zootopia Police Department, Zone D-19. We're going to sit down and run over your story, the whole thing, to make sure we've got the record straight." Juno nodded and, without missing a beat, pulled out a pen from her jacket, along with a small rectangle that she began writing on.

_I knew she had one of those! _Nora thought, though she was still was mildly surprised to see that it wasn't a digital tablet, but a leather-bound notebook filled with actual paper.

"Of course. Though I hope everyone knows that I'll be writing everything down, too. For the sake of posterity, and all. And though I'm sure Mayor Cantor is doing his best to scrub this particular law out of the books as quickly as he can, Article 73, Subsection 8-Dash-7 of the Zootopian Citizens Rights Act of 1967 makes it clear that I have every right to keep documentation of conversations between myself and officers of public service, unless I am being officially charged with an offense and my legal counsel has been contacted." Juno regarded the rest of the officers, including Nora. "And Officer Khatri has reassured me that I am not being charged with anything tonight." The confidence Juno was now brimming with was so infectious that Nora could almost ignore how plainly irritated Chief Dasher was already.

"You aren't being charged _yet_,rabbit." Dasher said. The cheetah's voice was low and hoarse, having that feline quality of a stringed instrument that was wound just a bit too tight before the bow dragged across it. "Though, the morning's only just begun, and I'm pretty sure one of our interns already has a couple energy brews ready to go. I'd love to have this all over and done with before the sun comes up, but whatever happens next is up to you. Are you ready to talk?"

"Yes, I am, though I would like to request that Officer Khatri join us for the interview." The Chief laughed humorlessly.

"Sorry, rabbit, but no. Officer Khatri will be plenty busy debriefing with our ground crew here, and something tells me that there will be quite a lot of paperwork for her to get started on, given her…conduct in the field tonight." Shifting her glare to Nora, the Chief added: "I saw one of Ursa-Corp's insurance agents scurrying about - the weasel with the bad toupee? You've met him before, I'm sure. He looked _especially_ flustered, so you'll want to get started before his little heart explodes out of his chest, or something." Nora had at least three or four sarcastic quips at the ready to protest with, but she knew that it wouldn't do either herself or Juno any favors to drag this night on longer than it had to.

"Looks like this is where I get off, Miss Mori. Do me a favor, and don't tell the Chief about all of the top-secret office memos I stole from Ursa-Corp. My performance review is in just a couple of weeks, and I don't want to spoil my perfect marks."

"I'd be happy to put in a good word for you," Juno said, and then held up her hand for Nora to shake, which Nora accepted, and she immediately noticed the little square of paper pass from Juno's paw to hers. She must have folded up the note while nobody was looking, or if anybody had seen, none of the other officers expressed any concern to Nora as Juno, the Chief, and Officer Tasana made their way towards the precinct's exterior doors. Looking back over her shoulders one last time, Juno called: "If you'd ever be interested in sitting down for a more formal interview, Officer, here's my information. I would love to have someone from the ZPD on the record, for a change. In the meantime, I'm going to consider everything we said tonight as off the record!"

There had been at least a half-dozen microphones in both her suit and the ZPD transport that were recording everything Nora and Juno had said all night, which she was sure Juno also knew, but she appreciated the sentiment all the same. Dallis and Brody were the only ones left with her now, and the grumpy pig was clearly eager to return to the confines of the precinct's tech-lab. Brody and Nora followed him to the elevator platform just beyond the eastern landing pad where the transport was parked. One of the perks of being the Head ZPD Technician and Science Officer, as Dallis often liked to remind anyone who would listen, was that it was all too easy to commission things like direct elevator access from the basement labs to every floor of headquarters. The pig would always explain that it was a security and efficiency measure, but that really meant that he just didn't want to share either the regular elevator or the building's stairwell with anybody he didn't want to.

Safety bars sprung up around the metal platform, and the trio began their descent into the building's sublevels.

"I'm not even going to begin with the headaches you've caused all of us tonight, Nora," Dallis growled, "because I know you don't care how much misery your friends go through on your behalf, and it's too damned early in the morning for me to start pushing that particular boulder uphill."

Body's focus remained on the evidence bag he was turning about in his paws. "You know he doesn't mean anything by it, Nor," he said. "He's just mad that he didn't get to see this baby in action with Delilah's cameras." Delilah, Nora figured, was the name that the two had christened their bugbot with. They always liked to give cute nicknames to their creations – it was, point of fact, just about the only subject that didn't even around a playful amount of bickering between the two.

"I'm sure you two will have plenty of alone time to play with your new toy," Nora said with a wink. "Just make sure you don't start any fires or anything. Then the Chief might actually kill one of us. Or all of us."

"Speaking of which," Dallis said, "What's that little note the bunny passed you all secret like?" Nora looked down gave Dallis a raised eyebrow the pig simply waved off with his hoof.

"It's like I always tell you, fox, there _are_ some advantages that come with being the shortest fella in the room. The rest of you might have been playing "Who's the Alpha" with your staring contests, but I was actually paying attention. She slipped you that square of paper like a schoolgirl passing notes when the teacher ain't looking. It was pretty cute, to tell you the truth." Dallis nudged Nora's still closed right paw. "So, what the big secret?"

Nora opened her palm and unfolded the paper, angling it carefully so her two friends couldn't get an easy look at it.

"Let me guess," Brody said, his eyes still fixed squarely on the gun and not the note, "She confessed to being the mastermind behind the whole break in? Or did she kidnap your brother and hold him for ransom?"

"I don't have a brother, dummy," Nora said as she scanned the paper. Dallis tapped his hoof impatiently.

"Well? Come on, you know we're not going to rat you out to the Chief."

"Don't be insensitive, Dal," Brody chided.

"Oh, you all know what I mean."

"Sure thing, buddy" Nora said. "But it's nothing exciting. Just an inside joke, I guess."

"Sure it is," Dallis grumbled, but he knew well enough to drop the issue. Instead of prodding any further, the pig turned his attention to the fancy gun, which he had decided was too important for Brody to break with his big clumsy wolf paws. While the two of them bickered, Nora turned Juno's message over in her mind. It was a bit of an inside joke, Nora hadn't lied about that. It wasn't _just_ a joke, though. It was also a lead, scrawled in a hasty yet somehow perfectly legible scrawl:

Won't_ lie to the Chief, but this scoop is __just for you__: _

_ Former Ursa-Corp: Terrence Padfoot – Missing two wks, maybe foul play? Worked with w/ever was on Floor 128_

_ This crummy old future of ours might = broken machine, but it __can__ be better_

_ Find me at the March Hare,_

_ J_

"Sly bunny," Nora said, and smiled.

* * *

A/N: And that's the end of Chapter 1! Please, feel free to leave your thoughts and comments - any and all feedback is greatly appreciated - and be on the lookout for the beginning of Chapter 2, which should be posting in week or two.

Up Next: We'll catch up with a couple of very familiar faces from Zootopia's present day, and then we'll take a jump back into the city's past to meet another rabbit and another fox, whose meeting will set the stage for a very different kind of mystery than anything we've seen before...


	4. First Interlude - Nick

**First Interlude: Nick (June 21****st****, 2018 A.D.)**

Why on Earth Judy Hopps still saw fit to stay in her crummy old apartment at the Grand Pangolin Arms was something Nick Wilde had been puzzling over for the better part of a year now. A part him knew he shouldn't judge; for goodness' sake, he had lived underneath a bridge for a not-insignificant period of time ("I was just playing the waiting game while my portfolio came together" was the line he'd deliver with a knowing wink and smile if anyone at the ZPD ever bothered to follow-up on that particular detail of his and Judy's now infamous first adventure together.)

And yet, Nick couldn't help but be morbidly impressed by whatever fresh new hell he discovered creeping in and around den of cracked wallpaper and conspicuously stained drywall that Judy Hopps was so keen on calling home. The neighbors were still a handful and a half, and the fact that they weren't already up and screaming at each other this morning was an exception to the rule. Nick was also sure he'd only met the ancient landlady of the building once, and he was only half-joking when he later insisted to Judy that the old armadillo was just an old ghost, haunting the place where she had met her grisly end, like something right out of _The Shining_ ("The good one that Steerly Kubrick made back in the 80s", Nick would make sure to add, every time. "Not that crappy TV show with the lame computer effects.").

When he'd first joined up with the Zootopia Police Department, and saw the rather measly salary a rookie earned in his first year on the job, Nick had thought he understood why Judy was so content to shack up in such a decrepit old place; though even if his own new and more permanent abode on the east side of the Canal District also left a lot be desired, it didn't give off the faint but compelling aura that several unsolved missing animals cases could be solved if you just knocked down a few feet of drywall and started sniffing around for bodies. He'd made _that_ joke to Judy a few times on patrol, too, and he still couldn't decide if her response of half laughter and half knowing-stare was her just messing with him back, or a sign that he really did need to put his new policing skills to good use. At the very least, his buddy Elmer from the Health Department might someday receive an "anonymous tip" and come down to do some sniffing around of his own – even if he didn't find any dead bodies, Elmer was the best in the business at picking up asbestos (among other illicit toxins), and the old bear was usually more than happy to shut down any operation that didn't live up to code.

"Think about it, Carrots," he had said to Judy once, a few weeks after his graduation from the Police Academy, "The lawsuit alone would get you enough money to buy your own place in Sahara Square, or maybe even the Meadowlands. You would even have enough left over to buy me out slumming it in the renter's life too – I could sleep in a shed in your backyard, or even one of those trailers you all love so much back in Bunnyburrow. I'm just saying, it's what a true, blue police partner would do." Judy, who was still only half-certain that Nick's days as a grifter were behind him for good, had laughed that one off like all of his other snarky remarks. At the time, there was no indication that either of them had anything more substantial to say about Judy finding a new place to live, or the notion that Nick coming along to join her was something the fox might be taking more than a little seriously.

It was this exchange that Nick found himself thinking about as he stood outside Judy's door, dutifully waiting for her to finish her morning routine and take the ride with him to Precinct 1. The moment was stuck in his mind, playing on repeat like a scene from a DVD that wouldn't stop skipping. He couldn't quite place, why, either – it wasn't like the moment was embarrassing, or painful, or anything like that. It was just a joke, really, another wisecrack to chuckle over during the morning commute. Wasn't it?

Yet that memory was what had spontaneously popped into Nick's head once he'd left his apartment and headed to Judy's on that June morning, and it was still stuck in his mind's craw now. There was something else, too, a barely remembered fragment of a dream he'd had last night. Something about an impossibly bright stream of neon skyscrapers, a cacophony of glass and gunfire, and a rabbit with violet eyes…

_(her ears turned ever so slightly toward Nora, and the fox wondered if the rabbit had somehow)_

"I'll be out in just two shakes of a lamb's tail!" Judy called from inside her apartment. _Speak of the devil_, Nick thought.

What he responded with was: "Just so long as that little lamb is still behind bars!" It was one of a few sets of lines that the two of them cycled through during what had become their daily routine, barely deviated from in the nine months since the two had become partners on the force. At first, they had talked about trading off who met who in the morning on an alternating basis, and Judy was still happy to stick to the plan even when Nick found a place so far out of the way, but Nick preferred their current arrangement. Her place was just a hop and a skip from the train that took them to the precinct, so Nick was happy to rendezvous here every day, even if he was constantly worried that a creepy pair of twins would poke their heads out of the corner and demand that he come play with them forever.

Nick could hear Judy rustling about inside, digging through drawers and singing along with her morning playlist – this song Nick had heard before, a funky collaboration between Gazelle and Bruno Mares that Nick hated to admit would be stuck in his head all week. Beneath the surface level noise, Nick could also just make out the soft bubble of percolating coffee, and when the machine's alarm beeped just a few seconds later, he also caught the telltale _sproing_ of Judy's toaster. Judy's borderline obsessive love of fruit flavored toaster pastries was one of the first things Nick had learned about Judy once everything had settled down after the Night Howlers Incident, which is what the papers had decided to call the events Nick more affectionately referred to as "The Time Judy Hopps Broke The Whole City, and Also Made Nick Cry." These days, Nick only called it that when he was feeling especially feisty, since his arms could only take so much of Judy's affectionate (but shockingly strong) punches.

In a flash, from the other side of the door, Nick heard the simultaneous scraping of toaster pastries onto a plate, the pouring of coffee (along with Judy muttering "Ow! Ow! Hot!"), and the jingle of keys as Judy crammed everything she needed into her pockets with her free hand. Nick couldn't see any of this, of course, but he had a perfect picture of it in his head, so perfectly predictable was the routine. Nick hadn't even rapped on the door this morning to get the process started, and he hadn't ever really needed to in the first place. The whole "living alarm clock" bit was mostly a pretense. Judy just liked knowing that someone was waiting for her when she started her day, and though it would have taken several doses of some after-hours nightcaps to get him to admit it, Nick felt much the same way.

The door flung open, and there stood Judy Hopps, she of the ZPD and the Night Howlers and the toaster pastries, her eyes and her smile as big and buoyant as always. Her uniform looked so crisp that Nick figured she had just finished ironing it. Nick would never understand this habit of hers; he always figured some wrinkles and wear-and-tear were a good look for public servants. That way, people could tell that they actually had to break a sweat working their beats, figuratively speaking. One thing both Nick and Judy both made sure to do in the morning, though, was polish their ZPD badges to a glistening shine.

_(the thing about a broken machine is that it __can__ be fixed. We just need to find the right parts, and someone who can_)

Judy held out the plate of breakfast, along with one paper cup filled nearly to the brim with piping hot coffee, which Nick accepted with a dramatic little bow. "Two creams, three sugars, and just a little on the stale side" she said, winking. "Just the way you like."

"Like I keep telling you, Carrots", Nick said, sipping his coffee with one hand and balancing the place of treats in other, "You ought to quit this ridiculous cop business and open up a coffee chain. We could set up a truck right outside of Little Rodentia, and charge three bucks for every thimbleful of the stuff. The little fuzzballs would probably all have heart attacks within the week, but you'd give Starbucks a run for their money. I'd handle the finances, of course." They were leaving the musky confines of the Wild Pangolin Arms, now, heading down and out into the already bustling streets of Downtown Zootopia.

"That makes total sense, Nick", Judy said, with mock sincerity. "With how good you are at cooking the books, we'd make a million bucks before the year is out, and still somehow _make_ money on our tax returns!"

"Judy, you wound me! _Only _a million? Ol' Fennec would never let me live it down if I did anything less than five, minimum."

They were rounding the corner of Grizzlyton Avenue and 31st Street, and the pair quickly cut across to the train station. There was a corner of the trains third car, four seats from the main doors, that were Nick and Judy's unofficially reserved seats. Judy sat while Nick stood by her, holding on to the lowered handle meant specifically for smaller mammals like him. Judy, who couldn't consider a day properly begun without a bite of breakfast, was happily nibbling on her square of melty strawberry strudel. The blueberry one, Nick knew, was for him.

"Alright, partner," Judy said, "Are you ready for another day of keeping Zootopia's criminal underworld at bay?"

"Oh, you know it, Carrots," Nick replied. "Today might be the day that we finally catch up with whoever has been leaving all of cow-pies outside of the new Mayor's office. You should see the conspiratorial cork-board I've been working on – the amount of money I've spent on yarn alone is gonna drive Chief Buffalo Butt up the wall, I bet."

"Is something the matter, Nick?" Judy was giving Nick her serious eyes, and though he hadn't felt like he was giving away his distracted state of mind, the bunny was nothing if not an observant detective.

"I was just kidding about the 'Buffalo Butt' thing, Carrots. Bogo rear-end is more comparable to that of a refined, well-built hippopotamus, I think." Judy didn't look amused.

"Seriously, Nick, I can tell when something is on your mind. You've got the poker face of hyperactive hamster."

"Some of the best poker players I've ever met were hamsters, I'll have you know!" Judy still wasn't conceding. She wasn't wrong, though, and Nick knew that his friend was nosy enough that she wouldn't let it go until he gave her something more substantial than some dumb, awkward joke he was maybe feeling embarrassed about almost a year after the fact. "Alright," he said, "You've got me. I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Didn't sleep well."

"Bad dreams?" Judy asked. Nick was ready to wave off the suggestion, but come to think of it, his dreams had been, if not bad, then definitely a _stranger than usual_. He didn't often remember his dreams, truth be told, but this one was lingering, though only in

(_she immediately felt the sickening tug of gravity in her gut, and for a split-second Nora really did feel like she might just keep falling, down and down until)_

bits and pieces. Fragments.

"Not a nightmare or anything," Nick said, "Just…a weird dream, I guess. The kind that puts you in a funk, even if you can't quite say why." Judy's ears perked up at this, and she immediately adopted the air of an excited teenager interested in some juicy gossip.

"Describe it to me!" she said. "I love hearing about weird dreams."

"Carrots, _nobody _likes hearing about other people's dreams. Besides, there's nothing to tell."

"Come on, Nick, humor me! You know you can tell me anything, right? Unless…" Judy leaned in, comically shifting her eyes about and nudging Nick playfully. She whispered, "Unless it's the kind if 'private dream' you don't want to talk about in public? Don't worry, Nick, I won't judge you. I'm a rabbit after all, and one of the first things we learn about in school are reproductive–" Nick gently nudged the rabbit back into her seat.

"Carrots, I cannot understand how, between the two of us, you ended up being the lewd and crude one, but no. It wasn't anything like that, and if it _had_ been, I would tell to Clawhauser or Fangmeyer before I told you. Call me sexist if you want, but there are some lines I'm not about to cross with a bunny like you, no matter how sly you are."

"Alright then, Mr. 'Bro Code'. What was it then? In all the time we've been coming to work together I've seen you in a funk like this maybe two or three times, and I didn't forget breakfast this time, so I know _that_ can't be the issue. We've got, like, ten minutes left before the train hits the station, so spill it. Otherwise, I'm going to eat your blueberry strudel."

"Alright, fine," Nick said, "But you're going to be disappointed. I can barely remember most of it, anyway. I was…here, in Zootopia, I think, but it was different. Shinier, somehow, and bigger. All of the lights were these bonkers colors like I'd never seen before, shifting around and glowing like something out of a science-fiction movie. That's kind of what the whole thing felt like: science-fiction. I want to say there were even been flying cars, but I dunno. I was on top of a building, I want to say, and I was looking down at the city and watching all of this crazy stuff happening, and suddenly there was this big crash, and all of this smoke, and broken glass, and all of a sudden I was falling off this impossibly huge building. It felt _real_, I guess. The craziest thing was, and maybe this is what has me feeling so out of sorts: I wasn't scare; I was…excited. Like I wanted to jump. Like I was happy for the smoke, and the glass, and the fire."

He was already regretting how he'd phrased that last part, because Judy looked more concerned than amused, and could he blame her? Her best friend has just told her he had dreams of explosions and jumping off of skyscrapers. _I'm also pretty sure I was a girl who could turn invisible, _Nick thought, but didn't say. Then he really would sound crazy.

"That's so strange…" Judy said, and she was clearly perturbed. Nick was already preparing for Judy to start giving him the talk about how the ZPD offered all of its officers free counseling, the very thought of which caused Nick to shudder.

"But like I said, Carrots, it's nothing, really. I was watching some cheesy old sci-fi flicks on cable the other day, and I probably just–" Judy cut him off.

"No, that's not it. I was just thinking about a dream _I_ had. It wasn't about flying cars or anything like that, but it made me feel…" Just then, their train came to a screeching halt. Even if it wasn't a full five minute before they were supposed to get off, the violent shudder of steel against steel made it obvious that something was wrong. There were only a handful of other animals in the car with them, and all of them started panicking at once. Nick and Judy both immediately stood, calming the passengers and asking if anyone had seen what happened. None of them knew, but then a meek looking otter in a conductor's uniform came in through the train's interior doors.

"Everyone, please, remain calm. We just got word that whole public transportation system has been shut down between 31st and 8th street. The emergency brakes were activated by computer – there's nothing wrong with the train; we're safe."

"Would you mind telling us what exactly _is_ happening then?" Nick asked. "The whole train system doesn't just get shut down across twenty blocks for no reason." Judy was tapping him on the shoulder, and he turned to see the black plume of smoke that was rising out of the sky just a few blocks ahead.

"Oh no. Oh God, Nick…" The fear in Judy's voice immediately flooded through him as well. Even without a clear view through the foliage and architecture of Downtown Zootopia, both of them knew exactly where that column of ash was rising from.

It was the Zootopia Police Department, and it was on fire.


	5. Smog, Ash, Other Rotten Things (Pt 1)

**02: Smog, Ash, and Other Rotten Things (June 21st, 1896 A.D.) **

**1.**

Standing on the front steps of his apartment on Carding Street, Jay Lightfoot watched as the vibrant plume of titian smoke unfurled in the sky above the Central Headquarters of the Zootopian Police Force. It was difficult to get a clear view of the fire through the masses of hastily cobbled-together buildings that stood all along Downtown Zootopia's ever-expanding spider-web of roads, alleyways, and backstreets, but the Headquarters had been burning for hours now, and the local fire departments were doubtlessly struggling to contain the inferno as it reached its peak. Only two days ago, the Police Force held a district-wide picnic in celebration of their fiftieth anniversary serving the fledgling metropolis. This morning, Jay had awoken to the sounds of clattering fire carts, frantic alarm bells, and the telltale shuffle of dozens of curious hoofs and paw pads scraping eagerly against the cobblestone, as animals of all shapes and sizes fought for the best vantage point at which to observe the blaze. Some smaller creatures were perched on their larger neighbors' backs and necks, while others had taken to climbing the roofs and building stairwells, and the air buzzed with anxious chatter. Many were concerned, others were angry, and some of the neighborhood's especially crusty creatures even saw fit to whoop and cheer, for the Police Force were no friends of theirs.

Though Jay stood somewhat taller than most rabbits at a little over three-and-a-half feet, he was content to observe the ascending pillar of ash and smoke from his own stoop. Despite sharing what could charitably be called a "complicated" history with the Police Force, Jay wasn't the fire-chasing sort. Public blazes, cart-crashes, local brawls, and other spectacles of misfortune were a common source of entertainment for the bored and aimless masses, though Jay had never found much thrill in schadenfreude. Still, this was Zootopia, so crowds were bound to build whenever anything interesting of note occurred in public, and what was more interesting than one of the city's newest and most controversial additions going up in smoke? Where the crowds went, so went the local chatter, and keeping up with the talk of the town was a matter of both personal and professional interest for Jay – it just so happened that this morning's big to-do brought the crowds, and their chatter, to him for once. So Jay stood patiently at the top of his somewhat crooked stoop, his ear's subtly swiveling this way and that to pick up the voices in the fray.

"My God, you can see so much smoke from here, do you think the whole building is gone? What if–"

"Even if the fire wagons get there on time, who knows if the fire's gonna spread southward…"

"Daddy, who would want to set the nice police on fire?"

"I don't know, sweetie, I'm sure it was some kind of accident, or maybe–"

"Arrogant pricks got what they deserved, if you ask me. Never see any of them 'round these parts, 'cept for when they want to puff out their chests and show off their fangs."

"The dummies think that just because they're bigger than so many of us, they can just impose their will – oh, Officer, excuse me. Lightfoot? You mean the rabbit? Yeah, he lives right over there, at 37A."

This last part caught Jay's attention. He turned his head to align with his ears to see the imposing outline of a figure that was shuffling their way through the rest of the gathered animals, straight towards Jay's apartment. It only took a moment for a pair of huge, gruff paws to poke their way through the crowd, followed by the rest of the brown bear that they were attached to. He wore the soot-stained but still unmistakable attire of the Zootopian Police Force: A navy blue set of jacket and trousers, fashioned with brass buttons and clasps that might have been polished to a shine under better circumstances. The insignia on his custodian helmet, along with the array of ribbons and medals splayed across his breast, identified him as the Detective Chief Superintendent, which meant the bear had gotten a promotion since the last time he and Jay had spoken. The officer approached Jay without speaking, taking one laborious step after another until he stood hunched underneath the signpost that hung above the front door. He swiveled his head upward to read it.

"Jay Lightfoot, Professional Historian and Investigator for All Matters Private and Public. Discretion Guaranteed! Rates…Negotiable?" The bear turned his gaze down to raise an eyebrow at Jay. "Come on now, Mr. Lightfoot. I respect that you've finally added 'Investigator' to your plaque, but you could have at least sprung for a catchy slogan. 'Rates Negotiable' makes you sound like a schoolboy bargaining for lunch trades."

Jay did not smile at this rather limp attempt at a joke. "Hello, Lieutenant Arborlin. Or should I say _Chief_ Arborlin? I assume you didn't trudge all the way up here from your smoldering office just to offer your opinion on my choice of signage?"

"Oh, of course not," the bear responded, deadpan. "It's just that, what with the fire and all, the men all got the idea to roast some chestnuts while we waited for the blokes at the fire station to do their thing, and I told them I knew a ripe old nut that lived on Carding Street that would do us just fine." Jay did smile just a little at that stupid pun, begrudgingly. The bear still had a knack for them, after all this time, and Jay was an easy mark as always. The chief removed his helmet and took another step past the sign, hunching even further as he approached Jay. He wore a look of genuine apology and humility on his face, which disarmed Jay even further. "It _is_ Chief Arborlin now," he continued, "though I'd prefer it if you stuck with George, for today. I'm sorry to come to you uninvited, but I figured you'd turn me down outright if I posted you ahead of time. You can imagine how things are right now, so please believe me when I say that I'm here not just as an officer of the force, but as an old friend. Will you lend me a moment of your time?"

Jay tried to retain his veneer of hostility, but after a moment he rolled his eyes, heaved a sigh, and opened the door to 37A, beckoning the bear inside. "Alright, George. I'll give you ten minutes."

"Trust me," George said, "It'll only take five."

**2.**

"Apologies ahead of time for all of the rubbish," Jay said, as they entered. "I'm in the middle of a few cases, and, well, you know how it is. Take a seat wherever you like, I'll fetch something to drink. I don't have anything hard, since I haven't been to restock the icebox in awhile, but I can put on tea if you like. I know you're not much for coffee."

"No thank you," George said, still stooping by the front doorway. "Like I said, this shouldn't take but a few minutes. This is a nice place you've got set up here though. Much better than that old closet." Jay chuckled, beckoning to the unkempt piles of papers and half-finished mugs of coffee that were strewn about the cramped first floor of 37A. His parlor, which was little more than a sofa, a small table, and a pair of tattered old sitting chairs, hardly made for a picturesque reunion between two old colleagues.

"I suppose it is something of an upgrade compared to my office in the library," Jay laughed, "Though it is a pain to have to haul all of my research materials across town on the trolleys, these days." He sat down in one of his chairs and picked up one of the mugs from a set of three that accompanied one of his piles of hand-scribbled notes and torn newspaper articles. He examined the cup's greasy contents, swirling them around for good measure, and replaced it in favor of the middle mug. He sipped its lukewarm brew with exaggerated relish before meeting George's eyes once again.

"So. You say you've come both as a friend _and_ as a face of the old' Police Force, is that it? If you're asking me to help you track down whoever lit your building ablaze, I know that _you_ know that arson cases are the most futile of the bunch, unless you have eyewitnesses that can pin the fellow who lit the match, and I'm guessing you wouldn't be here if you did. I'm sorry to say that the odds of catching them, even with my help, are terribly –"

"It's not about the fire, Jay." George said. "We're taking care of what we can, there. It's something else altogether." George paused. "I'm here about a body."

"A body?" Jay said. "You surely wouldn't have come to me over some accidental death…so you must mean a murder?"

George's eyes scanned the room as he searched for how to respond. "Given the…nature of her remains, it's undoubtedly a murder case, yes."

"So it's a woman, then? A terrible shame..." Jay leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs. "Sad as it is, though, this is Zootopia, George. Animals die every day here; men, women, and children alike. I was under the impression that the Zootopian Police Force had all of that business under control all on their own? Is it possible that a little bit fire is all it takes to toss all of your big, ferocious detectives off their balance?" Jay took a final, dramatic swig of his pungent black coffee. "It's been a long time since I've assisted with a murder case. Not since the Brixton incident, as a matter of fact. I don't know if you recall-"

"I recall." George interjected. "That was the last one you helped me with before you kicked off for good. Ugly stuff. Though it doesn't seem like so much, these days." Though his features were as stony as ever, Jay knew the bear well enough to catch the tell-tale twitch of the ears, and the way his breathing shifted ever so slightly. George's patience was running thin. Whatever it was that had brought him to 37A after all this time, it _was _weighing on him.

"Perhaps for you," Jay continued, "but the nastiness remains as vivid in my mind as ever. I'm not much for the macabre, George, at least not when it sneaks past the leaves of a book and into the realm of the real. It's why I distanced myself from police casework in the first place."

"Was that it?" George said, smiling humorlessly. "Not quite how I remember it, but I understand you all the same. It's not an easy line of work, after all. Some aren't just cut out for it, as you know." That barb hung in the air between the two of them. It was sharp, and Jay was tempted to retort, but he resisted. The conversation would never get anywhere if the two of them danced around their old grudges the whole time.

"Tell me, then, Chief Inspector," Jay said. "If you've got all of the best lions, tigers, and bears that Zootopia has to offer working on whatever grim crimes have come your way, what consultation could I possibly provide in their stead? Surely you know that these days my work mostly consists of financial and domestic disputes? Fraudulent insurance claims, appraisals of inheritances and recovered family heirlooms, cuckolded husbands with a chip on their shoulder. That sort of thing. When it comes to catching killers, I'm a bit rusty."

"Some advice, Jay. That's all I'm asking. Take a look at what we've got, offer a little of that Lightfoot perspective." Jay stood from his chair and began pacing about, gnawing on his lip in frustration before acquiescing.

"How did she die? Where?" George hesitated.

"She was found in an alley. Stab wounds, and…other wounds. We suspect blood loss was what did it. Maybe head trauma."

"You've already gone after the husband?" he asked. "Nine times out of ten, it's always someone close like that. Husband, lover, jilted suitor. A lot of men have the capacity for savagery. Predator, prey, it doesn't matter, and the women are usually the first to suffer for it."

"It's nothing to do with a husband," George said.

"So she's unmarried?" Jay's nose rustled as he puzzled things over. "Either young, or a spinster. If it was in an alley, then you're probably looking at a botched mugging. The only way to track _that_ would be to keep an eye out for fenced jewels, or-"

"I never said she wasn't married," George interjected. "I said 'nothing to do with a husband.' To tell you the truth, Jay, we don't know if she's married or not, yet. The body's still too fresh."

This took Jay aback. His ears perked, and his gaze narrowed. "What do you mean? You mean you've come to me before the report has been made, or the autopsy has been completed?"

George coughed nervously, fussing with his coat the way he always used to when he wasn't sure how to approach a problem. Finally, he said, "It's my fourth week as Chief Inspector, and my department is on fire." He finally shuffled over from the doorway and sat awkwardly the edge of Jay's too-small sofa. His helmet hung limp in his hands. "It's not so serious as you might think – the smoke makes it look worse than it is – but everything's a damned mess from the moment I'm out of bed to when I'm trying to coordinate dozens of officers from out of the sodding library, and you of all people should be intimately familiar of how difficult it is to find a book in that godforsaken building. Imagine trying to use it as an impromptu base of operations." Jay _could _imagine, though this only served to highlight one of the many differences between the two men standing in the cramped quarters of apartment 37A, that afternoon. Chief Inspector George Arborlin was predictably concerned for his men, who currently had to do their work from within the labyrinthine stacks of an ancient public library. Jay, on the other hand, was much more worried about the books.

"Now," George continued, "It isn't like the whole city is going to see that big plume of smoke billowing out of my headquarters and think, 'I guess that means there's no more crime to be done, today!' Of course not. So, while I'm literally fighting fires, I'm also fielding calls and directing officers left and right. A trolley smashed into one of those newfangled motor cars on the corner of 16th and Acre Street just thirty minutes after we evacuated to the other building, can you believe that? And some idiot kids decided to knock over a vegetable stand out by the new tenement buildings on 43rd. Then, in the middle of all this mess, I get word of a body. A woman, a young deer. She was found in an alleyway just a half-dozen blocks from where all of us were running around with our tails tied to the ground. One of the market boys, taking a shortcut to deliver his vegetables, stumbled over her in the dark of the early morning. The poor kid said he didn't even think she was dead at first. Plenty of animals pass out drunk in places like that. When his hands got all soaked, he thought maybe she was covered in booze, or rainwater. Until he got his paws into the light, and saw all that red." George paused here, and his eyes took on a stony quality that Jay hadn't ever remembered seeing back in the days the two of them worked together. He looked old, in that moment, and tired, despite only having a few years on Jay himself.

"In that moment, when this scared little aardvark kid is telling me this as he cries his guts out in the lobby of the public library, I have a feeling, Jay. In the pit of my stomach. I know that we saw some bloody scenes back in the day, but believe me, things are getting worse out there. _Stranger_. Chief Tusken saw it when he retired, I think. He never said anything, but I could tell. We all could. I think I might take a sip of that coffee, now." Jay obliged his old friend, and returned from his kitchen in only a moment with a slightly fresher cup than the ones he had been picking at earlier..

"It's cold," Jay said, apologetically. "I brewed it last night, to tell you the truth." George said nothing but gave a curt grunt in thanks. The cup was meant for smaller animals, and looked comically tiny in George's great big paw, but he handled it delicately, knocked the drink back in a single gulp. His wrinkled snout made it clear that Jay's coffee tasted as perilous as ever, but the bear also looked grateful for the distraction.

"Thank you." George said. Jay waited a moment for him to continue. "I've only been Chief Inspector for a month, and some of the things I've learned about this city…" Another pregnant pause. "In any case, I had this feeling. Sure enough, the minute I walk into that alley and saw what there was to see, I knew. I knew it wasn't any jealous husband, or random pearl snatcher. I knew, because of what the bastard did to her. I _knew_, because I'd seen it done before, not two weeks ago." George locked eyes with Jay, and what Jay saw in his friend's gaze made him feel incredibly uneasy. The bear had a great many faults, which Jay had made a habit of frequently pointing out back when the two of them had considered each other partners of a sort, but even after the bad blood got built up between them, never in his bitterest of moments would Jay have accused George of being a fearful man. Yet fright was exactly what Jay saw in those eyes. Plain, shapeless fear, the kind that might grip a child when he is too young to know that the monsters underneath his bed are merely a figment of the mind. He had only ever seen George this way once before, on a night when the moonlight had spilled into the dark corners of an empty house, and the two of them had found…

"George…" Jay repeated his question, but more gently this time. "What do you need from me?" George rose as much as he could and placed his helmet firmly back on his head.

"I came here, Jay Lightfoot, because there's a dead doe in an alleyway, and what was done to her is something I cannot describe without feeling ill. What makes me even more sick is that her case is not unique. We had another woman who was killed in almost exactly the same way, with the same…signs left behind. The papers barely covered the first girl's death, given her line of work, and we've done our best to keep the newshounds away from this second one for now, but with two dead in just as many weeks, I'm afraid…"

"You're afraid that there will be a third," Jay said. His mind returned to those cold nights he spent in his library office, all those years ago, piecing together the parts to a bloody puzzle that only made less sense when brought into the light of day.

"And a fourth," George said, nodding grimly. "Maybe even a fifth. If that happens, no animal alive could stop the word from spreading. Jay, we need to find whoever did this, and we need to stop him, before more folks are killed, and before the entire city gets swept up in whatever craziness has been bubbling up over these last few years. Don't get me wrong, I know my men can handle it, but there's just so little _time_…"

George trailed off, but Jay was already grabbing his coat from the rack by the parlor entrance. The rabbit stooped to quickly grab his leather case of equipment as well, and then he slid past George and pushed through the apartment door. The sunlight spilled in, and the outside air bristled with the smell of smog, ash, and other rotten things. Jay couldn't help but feel a quiver of morbid excitement stirring within him, along with more than a hint of dread. There were criminals and killers aplenty in Zootopia, but Jay and George had once encountered something that went beyond the pale of everyday violence. To have encountered that manner of hateful violence even one time had shaken Jay to his core, and he saw now that it George had been left with his own scars over the matter. To think that such evil could be afoot in his city again…

"Alright then," Jay said. "Take me to her."

* * *

_A/N: So this definitely took longer to get together than I planned, but life and work had a head on collision in the last weeks of the year that put me behind schedule. It's a new year and a new decade, though, and {Of Clocks and Calendars} has only just begun! I'm very excited to dig in to the good Mr. Lightfoot's story, as it will have a very different flavor from Nora and Nick's respective journeys (though the ties that bind them will be well apparent by the end of things)._

_Happy New Year, everyone, and I hope you enjoy this latest addition to the story._


	6. Smog, Ash, Other Rotten Things (Pt 2)

_Content Warning: This chapter gets fairly grim. I didn't think the content was graphic enough to warrant an M rating, but it should be noted this chapter specifically contains some descriptions of murder wounds, as well as paragraph or two that describes the suicide of a character from Jay's past. The Jay/Nathaniel chapters will generally be a bit darker than the other two narratives in the story, though this particular chapter is about as graphic as it will get for a good while. I will be sure to include content warnings for any future chapters that delve into such territory._

* * *

**3\. **

It was the smell of blood that struck Jay first. This was of no surprise; as a rabbit, his mind was inherently biased towards the "flight" half of the fight-or-flight response, and nothing triggered that instinctual rush of adrenaline and fear like the scent of freshly spilt blood. Ever since the push towards industrialization had begun only a few decades before, the air of Downtown Zootopia had become fetid with the stink of progress, a potent mix of sweat, smoke, sewage, and metal, among other things. Animals of all shapes and sizes had learned to tolerate the odors that wafted about the city from dawn to dusk, but the odor of death rises above all others for predator and prey alike, especially in the sticky summer heat. As George led Jay through the back door of an abandoned storefront and into the back alley beyond it, the rabbit had to dig his nails into his paws to keep from getting woozy, even before they could see the doe's remains. He had been around bodies before, and though the sight of the freshly deceased was no longer as unsettling as it used to be, the smell was always enough to make him sick to his stomach.

Jay would have been mortified at the thought of fainting in the middle of a throng of morbidly curious passersby, not to mention all of George's Officers. The alley was, mercifully, silent, though it could not possibly remain that way for long. George had not elaborated on the other killing that he mentioned earlier, but Jay was familiar with the chaos an event like this murder could cause. The minute word spread to the locals, animals would arrive from all over town to catch a glimpse of the victim, gossip about who was guilty and who wasn't would begin to buzz about, and the scavengers from the papers would no doubt be thrilled to contribute to the speculation, until panic spread like a wildfire. Jay and George had barely prevented such pandemonium once before, years ago. _To think that it could all be happening again,_ he thought. _Could I not have pursued a more noble line of work? Mother once said I would have made a fine baker…_

The bear trod a few steps ahead of Jay, gesturing orders to the small handful of trusted officers that were there to secure the crime scene without stirring up too much of a fuss. At the far end of the alley, a pair of timber wolves patiently stood alongside a single reporter from _The_ _Zootopia Gazette_, an otter that Jay vaguely recognized. That the _Gazette _was able to get within even a hundred feet of an active investigation spoke to the publication's reputation for possessing at least a modicum of moral decency compared to the usual rags. This wasn't to say it didn't contribute its fair share to the press' usual mélange of gossip, hearsay, and politicking; the _Gazette_ was simply more willing to play by the rules, hence the impatient otter with a pack full of equipment who had the good sense to at least wait until the police had finished their work to begin capturing the grisly details with his Kodiak camera.

Just beyond, a rather imposing lion stood guard where the alley opened up to the main street. Given the number of larger animals that occupied these tenements, the buildings loomed large over Jay's head. The crooked pathways between them were still narrow, and the lion's broad figure barely squeezed into the frame made by the brick walls on either side of him. Most of the local animals were probably still preoccupied with the spectacle at the ZPF Headquarters, but Jay spied the dawdling forms of a few curious locals that wanted to sneak a peek at the carnage in the alley (some of them were likely rivals of the otter from the _Gazette). _The lion officer was growling something about keeping a minimum distance away until the police had cleared the scene, and the onlookers had plenty to say in return, but Jay drowned them out as best he could. He needed to focus.

There was one more officer present, an elephant, whose obtuse silhouette seemed even more at odds with the alley's jilted architecture than the lion's. He was bending down at an awkward angle so as to get his trunk low enough to lift the ragged sheet that was covering the misshapen lump on the ground beneath him. The smell of death was overpowering now, and Jay did not envy the poor fellow that had to use his nose to poke and prod at the victim's remains. To his credit, when the elephant looked up from his investigation to greet George and Jay, he only looked mildly perturbed.

"Thank you for holding things together while I was away, Bailey," said George, extending his paw. "You're the only one I'd trust with as delicate a scene as this, especially with the rest of the mess we've had to deal with." The inspector let the fabric float back down to cover the doe, wiping his trunk on his coat before shaking George's paw with it.

"I can't say I relished the opportunity, Chief," Inspector Bailey said. "This here is…well, it's every bit as nasty as you said." The elephant cast a glance down at Jay. "Is this the rabbit you were telling me about? Who helped you out with the Brixton case?"

"He's the one. Jay Lightfoot. A friend of mine from a long ways back, and one of the smartest fools I've ever met." Despite the grim atmosphere, George allowed himself a chuckle at his own oxymoron. "Jay, this is Inspector Frederick Bailey. He doesn't normally cover these kinds of murders, but he's one of the best inspectors we have and, given how shorthanded we are today, we're damned lucky he was willing to get his trunk dirty with us." George turned his attention to the other officers in the alley. "As of this moment, I'm deputizing Jay as a liaison to the ZPF for the duration of the investigation. He'll be assisting us with his…expertise, and I fully expect for you all to work with him as you would any other officer. Have I made myself clear?" The lion and the wolves' confirmation came in the form of low grunts and begrudging nods. Jay nodded back in their directions. He had not expected any warmer a welcome than that.

"Good afternoon, officers. Inspector Bailey." Jay took a chance and extended his own arm out to Bailey, and he was pleasantly surprised when the elephant returned the gesture.

"I never thought I'd see the day a rabbit was working a crime scene," he said. "Though these are trying times, and I'd be lying to the both of you if I said I knew where to begin with this one. I reckon the Chief explained things on your way here?"

"Somewhat," Jay said, beginning to make his way toward the body. "Though he mostly impressed upon me that I would need to see what happened to the poor girl to understand." George and Frederick followed close behind him.

"It's good to know that he hasn't lost his knack for understatement, then," Frederick grumbled. George, for his part, said nothing. He merely strode past Jay and took hold of the sheet once more, lifting it fully up and off the doe's body. The stench had been one thing all on its own, but sight of the thing magnified the sharp, metallic undercurrent of blood and other fluids tenfold. Jay could barely contain the lurching gasp that threatened to squeeze itself free from his throat and he reflexively grabbed his handkerchief to cover his mouth and nose. A dark memory jutted forward to the front of his mind (t_he sanitarium_,_ the flies, the smell of fear and shame, the blades all rusted over, except it _wasn't_ rust, they were red with)_ but he quashed it at once. Despite Inspector Bailey's bemusement, this was not Jay's first murder scene. Jay had been preparing himself for this exact moment since departing the apartment at Carding Street. He just had to breathe, and step forward.

"Is your rabbit going to be alright?" Fredrick asked. Jay resisted shooting back a sarcastic retort – even if the elephant thought a rabbit wasn't up for the job of a more "composed" animal, it wouldn't do any good to start petty squabbles here. Jay would simply have to show Frederick why George had been so insistent on recruiting him in the first place.

"He'll be fine, Fred," George said. "Other rabbits might have turned their little cotton tails and run by now. Jay's never been like most rabbits, though. That's why I brought him."

If the elephant had something to say in response, Jay didn't hear it - he was drowning out the noise again. The thunder of blood in his temples was too loud already, and he might get nauseous if he didn't keep his concentration. The rabbit's ears swiveled slightly forward, and his vision began to focus in. His nose was twitching. The fur on his back and neck bristled with nervous energy. The doe. She was what mattered right now. She was the only thing that _could _matter. To consider anything beyond the dead girl that lay crumpled in a mangled heap a few feet ahead of him would be too much.

There was this misconception that tended to float amongst predatory circles, that prey animals reacted to the smell of blood and the sight of death with a blind fight-or-flight response; that, even in this age of evolved and ostensibly civilized animals, a rabbit like Jay couldn't be trusted to handle the pressure of something like a murder scene without succumbing to some atavistic fainting spell, or turning tail to run in the other direction altogether. This was not true at all, of course. There _were_ certain factors – the nausea, the adrenaline, the blasted involuntary twitching of his nose and ears – that Jay couldn't control; that much couldn't be denied. In much the same way even the sharpest-fanged soldier must be trained and acclimatized to the art of war, though, so too could any prey animal find their calling in, say, the city morgue. That _most_ prey animals had little interest in inoculating their senses to the macabre had less to do with evolutionary merit, and more to do with common decency, or so Jay had come to believe.

Jay had encountered seven corpses before in his life, and his memories of them were etched with horrifying clarity in his mind to this day. The first two had been the bodies of his father and brother, both of them dead by consumption before he'd turned twelve. Jay was sent away to live with his Uncle Pallance before either of them had fully wasted away, but he was called upon to collect their remains from the sanatorium when the time came. He could still remember the buzzing of the flies that flickered in and about his brother's wilted ears, and the ruddy blades left behind by the surgeons who'd had to remove his father's gangrenous leg in his final days. He'd initially thought the bone-saws were that color because of rust. What a foolish boy he'd been.

His third meeting with death had been when his mother took her own life. Her illness had been one of the mind; her hysterical melancholia had grown so acute that the doctors eventually concluded that it could only be treated with isolation, bedrest, and a total lack of "unnecessary stimulation". The Zootopian asylums had saved her body from consumption, but her spirit had all but rotted away by the time she had come to live with Jay and Uncle Pallance. It was Jay who found her curled up in her bed with an empty turpentine bottle nestled tightly in her bony arms, as if she were cradling a child. She might have been asleep, were it not for sickly stream of foamy spittle that spilled out of her open mouth, or the way her glassy eyes had stared vacant and still right into Jay's own.

Later, during his tenure at the library, Jay had been the one to lead the ZPF to the remains of a dead pig whose hoof Jay had spotted poking out of a crate down in the building's storage rooms. The poor bastard had been twisted in a dozen different ways that were about as far from "natural" as could be imagined, though Jay managed to impress a bear from the ZPF enough with the levelheaded perspective he offered the investigation; it was enough to serve a completely unexpected side-career for the rabbit. The other three dead men Jay met in his time assisting George and the ZPF as a sort of consultant, each of them with their dark tales to tell. Jay often looked back on those days with an ambivalent nostalgia, and though his independent investigative work had brought about its own brand of seedy misadventure, Jay never expected to find himself working with the Zootopian Police again. Yet here he was, in another dark corner of the city, staring down at another broken corpse.

"Broken" was perhaps too light a word for it. The poor girl had not simply been beaten, or choked, or stabbed, as Jay had initially assumed. To be sure, there was evidence of a violent struggle: the doe's right arm was twisted and bent nearly backwards at a jagged angle, for one, which was the kind of damage only a particularly strong animal could manage. She smelled of fear, and mud, and blood, along with a faint but overwhelmingly familiar hint of perfume. What was that smell? _Blueberry,_ Jay thought. Of course. His mother had liked to wear a scent very similar to this, back before things got bad.

The deer was wearing a cotton dress that may once have been a very vibrant green, though blood, mud, and time had worn the color down to a fouler shade (_like mold, or the scum from a pond, or maybe even a bottle of turpentine). _The garment was torn to shreds from the neck down to the waist, and the deer's chest and stomach were marked with ugly, plum-dark bruises that showed even through her matted fur. There were gashes, too, nearer up to the deer's ribs and already beginning to crust over with dried blood. Some of them were neat and very clearly deep, which Jay figured must have been made by a blade of some sort. Others, further down the doe's torso, were more gnarled and jagged streaks of tattered flesh– whoever killed this girl had used their claws too. Had they done so out of necessity? The stabs to the lungs would have been enough to do the deed, and the claw marks didn't look fatal to the naked eye. Did the murderer simply want to _feel_ the kill?

For as awful as those lesions were, though, they were nothing compared to the worst wound of all, the element of the crime that had shaken George up so badly, and what had the other men the alley standing with their ears perked to attention and their fur at edge. Jay had missed it at first, from a distance, but the horror of it was impossible to ignore up close, as his eyes traced the path of violence down the deer's body, from her throttled throat to the blackening stain that spread from where her navel used to be. Jay had thought Frederick had earlier asked if he would "be alright" as a matter of condescension, but he now realized that the elephant's concern might very well have been genuine. If Jay was right about this body's most vicious wound, then the elephant had every right to wonder whether someone would feel okay after considering what was done to this creature.

"My God…" Jay murmured, drawing back from her. "Is…did the killer _take _her…"

"Her organs?" George said. "Yes. Though the exact extent of it will be difficult to determine without the coroner's assistance. Still…" George was visibly struggling to verbalize the full scope of his thoughts. Jay looked up at Frederick.

"I didn't go poking around in there myself, obviously," the elephant said, "But studied anatomy at university, all sorts of species, males and females alike. Given where the cut was made, the way the wound has been stretched out like it is…"

"The killer clawed their way in…" Jay finished. "And the damage runs deep." The elephant nodded grimly.

"That isn't all," said George at last, and as he stepped closer to the back wall of the alley's alcove, he bent to pick up the oil lantern that Frederick had previously placed near the doe's body, raising it to the corner of the brick wall. What the flame's glow revealed was a message writ upon the stone, one that had not only been obscured by shadow, Jay noticed, but also the manner in which the words blended all too well into the worn red color of the stone. "It's her blood, alright," George said, answering the question before Jay could even ask it. He bent to the ground and rose with a sopping patch of hideously red cloth pinched between his claws. "You can't see it now, obviously, but this scrap is the same color and fabric as the dress she's wearing. The bastard tore it off her and used her like an inkwell before he left. As for what he wrote, well,.."

"That's why you came to me," Jay finished. He stood and approached the wall, and as his eyes adjusted to the half-light of the alley, the message became much clearer. Three lines were scrawled along the wall in half-legible smears, though Jay could only read one of them. "The first bit here is Latin…" Jay muttered, "Though it's a bit mangled: 'IMORTUI AD ANIMUM_'_. I think it's _supposed_ to read 'I_N_MORTUI AD ANIM_A_M_'_, with an "N" before the "M", and an "A" instead of the "U" there."

"What on Earth does that mean, then?" George asked.

"It's been a good long while since I took my Latin courses," said Frederick, "But I'm fairly certain '_anima_' is to do with 'life', while the root '_mortem_' is, well…"

"Yes, I get it, it means '_death',_" George cut in, his patience obviously wearing thin. "I want to know what it _means_, damn it!"

"There are a few different ways this _could_ be translated," Jay said, "And my grasp of Latin far from complete, but my instinct would be to read it as something like _'The undead to life_', but I won't pretend to know what it means…" The three animals let the words cling to their silent bewilderment. If whoever had done this was set on _creating _life, they certainly had the wrong idea of it.

"What about the rest of it?" George asked.

The second line read: Λεγιὼν ὄνομά μοι. What was the most peculiar about this was the relative neatness and clarity of the lettering – it was written in a similarly haphazard smear of blood, certainly, but Jay might have guessed that two different people had been responsible for the two different lines. The third line was indecipherable, consisting not of any recognizable language, but rather three separate symbols, and nothing that struck Jay as immediately identifiable as the glyphs of any culture he was learned in. The first image was that of a circle, with a series of interior lines crisscrossing each other and dividing the circle at odd curves and angles. The second was some unfamiliar species of flower, Jay thought, looking like a cross between a rose and an orchid. The third was a crude, two-dimensional approximation of a large animal's claw, which held what looked to be an eye in its palm.

"To be honest," Jay said, his brow furrowed in puzzlement, "I haven't the foggiest. I _think_ the second line is in Greek, but I can read that about as well as I can read Sanskrit, which is to say, not at all. I don't even know where to begin with the symbols at the bottom…" He could feel his ears flitting about with agitation. After taking a moment to collect his thoughts, he turned to George and said, "I'll need photographs of everything, for research. And you'll obviously want to check the materials that otter from the _Gazette _has with him before he makes off with it, and doubly so for any of those other vultures out there. In fact…" Jay gave the wall one final look, committing the words on it to memory as best he could, in case the photographic evidence fell through. "Scrub this whole thing away as best you can before any of the reporters get to it. I don't know if you can keep her out of their sights, but we have to keep _something_ out of the public record. A secret held just between us, and whoever the hell did this."

Frederick looked to George for approval, and the bear nodded his affirmation without hesitation. Frederick motioned for the timber wolves who were guarding the otter and muttered orders to them, and the pair obediently ran out to the exterior street and quickly returned with brushes, buckets, and other cleaning supplies bundled in their arms. George and Jay had used similar tactics before, and Chief Inspector had come prepared. While Frederick and the timber wolves worked, the otter moaned in dismay and scrambled to set up his camera before all of the most mystifying and macabre material disappeared in a foam of bloody suds. George and Jay, meanwhile, made their way to the exit guarded by the burly tiger.

"What will the next steps be then, Jay?" George asked. His gruff tone had softened into nearly a whisper. "Keep in mind that I won't be able to help you on the ground like I might've before. I'm completely tied up in keeping the Force held together. The library's like to be a lot more crowded than you remember, too, given the circumstances."

"I appreciate your position in all this George, and I'm sure I can manage on my own. I have my own resources outside of that dusty old library now, too, so until the coroner is ready to share his findings with us, I suspect I'll have to—"

Jay was cut off when he and George both caught some commotion just ahead of them. A civilian crowd had begun to gather at the alley's entrance after all, which Jay supposed was inevitable, but amid the throng of impatient newshounds and curious onlookers, the tiger keeping watch at the entrance was engaging with one animal in particular, a fox by the look of it, and their voices were growing louder and more agitated by the second.

"I'm telling you for the last time," the tiger growled, "I don't care what kind of cockamamie excuse you've got, no civilian is getting through, and if you don't step back…

"And I'm telling _you_, you stupid cat, that I deserve to know what's going on here! It's my damned_ family_ that could—" The tiger barked a derisive laugh at that.

"Trust me, _fox_, you don't have to worry about any family of yours being involved, unless you've got some particularly bloodthirsty kin slinking about. I suppose of these filthy old hovels would make for fine den!" The fox at the other end of this argument didn't bother to reply before lashing out towards the tiger, though Jay could only make out a single swipe of the claw that almost got halfway to the tiger's face before the officer gripped the fox's thin wrist in his hand and began to twist.

"Burns! What the _hell_ is going on?" George's voice was somehow both low _and_ loud, in a way that Jay had only ever heard bears manage with such quiet ferocity. Officer Burns snapped a look back to his Chief, shoving the fox forward towards George and Jay without loosening his grip.

"This _pest_ here is making demands of us," Burns said, "Saying that he needs to see the body for some godforsaken reason. I suspect he's some sort of deviant sir, and not to mention he damn near clawed my eyes-"

"Yes, yes, I saw," George said with calculated disinterest, "And I'm sure you were terribly frightened. You can let the fox go now, though. I promise I won't let him hurt you." Burns was clearly swallowing any number of the caustic replies that were swimming behind his fierce gaze. He turned his gaze down to the fox, whose own moss-green eyes were likewise shimmering with anger and pride, though the bear's tone was just a little more even with him.

"You've got a name, fox?" George asked.

"Nathaniel," the fox said, wrestling his arm away from Burns. "Nathaniel Barker."

"And why, might I ask, are you so insistent on impeding the investigation of this crime scene today, Mr. Barker? I have to think you're aware of how such behavior looks for…someone like you?"

Nathaniel Barker's eyes shifted from George, to Jay, to the space in the alley just beyond them, and then back to George again. He was taking deep breaths, and considering his words carefully.

"Like I tried to tell this…Officer here," he said, "I heard about a murder up this way, and I came to make sure that…I was worried about my _family_, you see, and I had to know if…" George and Jay exchanged looks, the bear's brow raised in skeptical curiosity.

"Well, Mr. Barker, I don't know what you expected to find here today, and while I can't speak to the whereabouts of your…your what? Your spouse? Your child? Whatever it is, what I _can_ assure you is that there haven't been _any_ foxes brought to the attention of the ZPF today, dead _or_ alive." George placed a huge paw on Nathaniel's tiny shoulders, ushering him back out toward the street. "Except for you, of course. Now, given how much we've got to deal with today, I'm willing to overlook your tussle with Officer Burns here, if you'd kindly-"

The fox didn't turn. He didn't move. His eyed had fixed on the space between George and Jay, where the dirt and shadows of the alley stretched back and through to the corner alcove, behind which lay the body of the doe. His eyes were no longer shimmering with anger – tears were streaming down his eyes and across his snout, forming dark streaks in his dusty grey fur.

"I can smell her perfume," he said. "It's the blueberry kind. Her favorite." George exchanged another glace at Jay, much more serious this time, and he took a step back from the grieving animal. Nathaniel locked eyes not with George this time, but Jay.

"A doe, right? Not too much taller than me, with blonde fur, and a dark green dress?"

"Yes…" Jay said, "Are you saying you can identify the victim? I thought you said you were concerned about your family?"

"I _am_ her family," the fox spat, and Jay did not begrudge him his rage. "Her name is...it _was_ Miriam. She was my sister."

* * *

_A/N: I'm not dead, and neither is {Of Clocks and Calendars}! My deepest apologies for the delay, but as I mentioned last time, life has been one big ol' ball of Stuff™, and it took me much longer than I thought to get a new chapter out. I hope you enjoy it, and don't hesitate to leave any feedback you have - it is always appreciated! Thank you all for reading._


	7. Smog, Ash, Other Rotten Things (Pt 3)

**4.**

Almost an hour after Nathaniel Barker identified the dead deer as his sister, Jay was sitting with George in the manager's office at the rear end of the bottom floor of the Downtown Zootopia Public Library, waiting for the fox to finish telling his story. Out in the stacks and cramped rows of cluttered desks, the library was bristling in quiet chaos; in the manager's quarters, it was a different story. Aside from the basement floor, which was at stock full of files and old crates and other academic detritus as it always was, this was perhaps the closest anyone in the library was going to get to any privacy for the time being. The few open storerooms in the lower levels were being used as temporary holding cells besides, with the day's usual assortment of drunks and debtors soaking in the dust of decade's worth of forgotten tomes.

Thus, George had ensured that office would also double as the Force's makeshift interview room by "requisitioning" the space from the rattled zebra who served as the library's head of staff. Presently, the zebra was busy making sure the building's meticulous systems of organization were not completely undone by the presence of the displaced Police Force, which meant that Jay and George could sit with Nathaniel while Frederick stood just outside the office doors, using his elephantine girth as a barrier for anyone that might have the poor sense to barge in and interrupt the Chief in the middle of his work.

Earlier, When Nathaniel saw the doe's body, he did not cry out in anguish; nor did he scream and lash out in a carnivorous display of rage, as Jay had halfway expected him to. The fox had simply stood there, stone silent, a few paces away from the corpse, not looking away from her, even when the sheet was lifted away to reveal everything that had been done to her in her final moments on Earth. The only thing he said then was barely a whisper, though Jay had no problem hearing it even from where he stood: "My God, Mir…"

The quiet resilience that Nathaniel displayed then had impressed Jay, and though it did not exactly draw the fox out from the web of suspicion surrounding the murder of his supposed "sister," Jay could tell that there _was_ a font of grief coursing just beneath Nathaniel's otherwise stoic face. What Jay could not yet decipher was the nature of that grief – was it the honest kind, borne from love, loss, and longing? Or did that faraway expression in Nathaniel's mossy eyes carry the shame-tinged stain of regret that accompanied guilt and the keeping of secrets?

Another thirty seconds passed without anyone in the room uttering a word. Nathaniel looked aimlessly past the rabbit and the bear that sat across from him, his brow furrowed and his nose twitching slightly in agitation. Then, at last, George leaned in to speak. The office's two desks had been rotated and shoved together end-to-end to serve as an improvisational interrogation table, and George leaned hard enough into the one he and Jay sat in front of to cause the oak to creak and give way. Since the bear had not bothered to prepare any of his note taking tools, Jay readied his own pen and notepad so that he could jot down any new information.

"So," George said, "Tell us again, Mr. Barker, how you happened to stumble upon our investigation of the murder of a doe who you claim to be your sister, of all things, in spite of your…well, your lack of a family resemblance."

Nathaniel blinked, as if he hadn't expected to be spoken to, though this expression quickly became one of irritation and exhaustion. "I told the both of you already," he said, "Miriam was my sister by _adoption._ Her parents took me in when I was five, after my pa died. My mother was already long gone by then."

"Mixed-species adoption is illegal," George said. Nathaniel shot the Chief a barbed look, but his voice did not waver.

"I know that. So did the Rosewoods. It was informal, and not legally binding, sure, but Horace and Mary Rosewood raised me like one of their own for almost twenty years. I spent almost all of my life thinking of them as my parents, and Miriam as my sister, and there isn't any piece of paper that would could make that any less true."

"Alright then, I'll buy it. I've still never heard of a couple of herbivores going out of their way to nab themselves a meat-eating tyke to call their own. Did your father leave you on the Rosewood's doorstep one day, then? Dropped you off with some poor, unsuspecting herbivores so he could skip out on the local debt collectors? Or was he just too flighty to handle raising a kit all on his own?"

Jay had half a mind to speak up on the fox's behalf. The Chief was cutting deep with his remarks, and Jay knew it was intentional. George wanted to tick Nathaniel off with cheap knocks at predator stereotypes, to see if the fox would crack before even getting to the tough questions. It was an understandable strategy, Jay thought, but a cruel one, and Jay had already had his fill of cruelty for the day.

Nathaniel did not crack, though. He was furious, of that there was no doubt, but he as not so stupid as to get into a screaming match with the Chief Inspector of the Zootopia Police Force while locked up with the Chief Inspector of the ZPF. Once again, Jay was impressed with the fox. Had the tables been turned to put Jay at the receiving end of such a stinging inquisition, he was not sure he would have kept his composure as well as Nathaniel was.

"Horace knew my pa from work," Nathaniel continued. "They both had shifts at the Lionheart Canning Factory, where they process and package all that bug mulch us predators eat. My pa didn't run out on me, either. He died. It was a fire at the canning factory, actually; one of the biggest of the past twenty years. If you want proof, I'm sure one of these old newspapers here has an article about it. Twenty-five dead, I think, and my pa's name, Andrew Barker, would be right there on the list."

"I do recall that fire," Jay noted. "I was young when it happened, but I remember. Half of downtown smelled like smoked fish guts for a week afterwards. I don't recall seeing a blaze that bad again in Zootopia until…well, until today, I suppose." George grunted, but otherwise ignored his friend's contribution to the conversation.

"So, your mother's dead, and your father's dead, and this doe's parents – Horace and Mary Rosewood? Did they just take in a work mate's orphaned kid out of, what? The kindness of their hearts?"

"Horace was best friends with my pa for years, actually," Nathan continued. "The way Horace tells it, there was some kind of incident in the early days at the factory, where the other guys on the floor didn't take too kindly to an herbivore working the canning belt with them. The Rosewoods used to be better off than working a slum job like that, but the Panic of '73 had the whole family turned out onto the streets. I think the other animals at the factory could smell that the Rosewoods used to have money – three generations of bankers on Horace's side. Of course, that drove the factory boys _nuts_. Horace told me that some of them went so far as to rough him up one day after shift, but my pa stepped in before things got out of hand. It was the first time any predator had stood up for him like that, at least that's how it was told to me."

"So the Rosewoods took you in out of respect for your father?" Jay asked.

"Yeah, that's the long and short of it. I hope you both understand now what I mean when I tell you that Miriam _was_ my sister. We don't look anything alike, and you won't find any papers or certificates that set us up on the same family tree or anything, but it doesn't matter. It never did, not for them, and not for me. If it wasn't for the Rosewoods, I'd be dead by now, or the closest thing you can be to dead after scrounging for scraps in Zootopia's slums your whole life. All of them treated me like family from the day I came into their home, and they never really tried to hide it either. And now…"

For the first time, Nathaniel's grief began to trickle through the wall he had been putting up ever since the sheet was lifted from Miriam Rosewood's broken body. His eyes shone a lucid green in the soft light of the manager's office. His muzzle shifted and twisted with muted emotion. George, for his part, had refrained from edging the poor fox on, though Jay could tell by the bear's steel-set features that Nathaniel would not be let off the hook just for getting emotional. George straightened in his chair, its wooden legs scraping dramatically against the hard floor.

"You speak about these Rosewoods in the past tense. Does that mean that the other two – the parents – have passed on as well?" Nathaniel nodded, slowly and solemnly.

"Yes," he said. "Both of them gone a few years now. Consumption."

Jay started at this enough to stop scribbling shorthand in his notebook. He glanced up, and saw that Nathaniel had noticed his reaction, which was perhaps the first time since their initial meeting in the alley that the fox had taken such direct notice of Jay. There was something in that recognition, a kind of understanding that passed between the two in that one moment. Why should it have mattered, though? Consumption was hardly a novel plague at this point – if you stopped any animal in Zootopia on the street, the odds were that they at least knew of someone who had succumbed to the illness, if they had not lost a loved one themselves. That this fox had lost not just his father, but his adoptive parents as well, was certainly tragic, but that should not have struck Jay as anything particularly meaningful. Zootopia may have been established as "the one great hope for predator and prey animal alike," but the flesh of all that progressive idealism was and always had laid atop the bones of citizens, animals whose lives were all made and unmade every day by their and triumphs and their tragedies alike.

Still, as committed as he was to maintaining the objective perspective that George had been counting on when he called on his help for this case, Jay could not help but feel a sharp pang of emotion for the fox sitting across their shabby makeshift table. The fox who, as Jay had to remind himself, could still very well be responsible for the grisly scene that had brought all three of them together today. That was the other thing. Tangled in with his empathy

(_the flies, the shame, the rust, the blood)_

was also rising pressure of another, more instinctual reaction in Jay's gut: Fear. There was a saying that passed through prey animal circles, though it was nowadays more hushed than it used to be, given that it ran contrary to the spirit of the whole enterprise that was Zootopia. There were variations of it that ran the gamut depending on the circumstances, but the one that might fit this situation went: "The only time a fox will shed a tear over a fawn is when his belly is stuffed full to bursting." Jay prided himself on not prescribing to such backward notions as so many animals in the city still clung to – he made it a point to work with clients of any shape, any size, and any dietary inclinations. The sticky copper smell of the doe's blood still clung to Jay's nostrils, though. He couldn't quite bring himself to ignore the way the fox's pupils went just a bit narrower as George's suspicious tone cut deeper, or the way his sharp teeth caught the light whenever he opened his mouth to speak.

George stood and strode past Nathaniel to peer through the blinds of the office window. He let the fox sit in silence for a minute while he watched his men do their work outside. Finally, he said, "You have to know how this looks, don't you, Nathaniel? Even if we can check out all of the details you've provided – the father lost in the factory, the benevolent family who took you in, all of it – what you _have_ given us doesn't lead us anywhere back to you." He turned back to Nathaniel again. "Once more, what brought you to the scene this morning. Surely you didn't sniff out your own sister's blood from across the city."

"George!" Jay interjected, "Really, I don't know if—" George cut him off without a word, staring him down and silently telling him: "_Quiet. Watch. Listen." _Jay backed down, again, though he gave George a curt look that the bear would easily recognize as meaning "_Tread carefully." _ The bear seemed to acknowledge Jay's meaning, but his tone went unchanged as he continued to press Nathaniel."

"As I was saying. Why were you there this morning, Mr. Barker? The deer couldn't have been dead for too long, and she was killed in the middle of the bloody night. You told us earlier that the two of you lived together in Savanna Central, all the way by the docks, on Berry Lane."

"The docks are where I work. It was the only job I could find here in town; it can be hard for us predators to find reliable employment these days, as I'm sure you well know. When Miriam and I left home after her mom and dad died, all we had was the little bit that they left us in their will, which was barely enough to get us on our feet. After months of scraping by with odd jobs between the two of us, I was finally able to get in moving crates around the shipyard at Longhorn's. Miriam got work cleaning apartments and doing laundry downtown. She worked odd hours, so sometimes she wouldn't come home until late, but last night was…different."

"Different?" Jay asked, sensing the hesitation in Nathaniel's voice. "How so?"

"I don't know how to put it," Nathaniel answered, "The night kept wearing on, and there was no sign of her. I got this feeling, a kind of worry, stuck in my head, turning around in circles over and over again…" It was obvious that there was more to the story than Nathaniel was letting on, at least to Jay. He caught it in the slight twitch of Nathaniel's ears as he spoke, and the ever-so-slight pauses he took to measure out his words. Jay stole another glance up to George to see if he was picking up the same thing, but the bear's features remained as neutral as ever.

"So you went searching for her?"

"Yes, I did. She rarely worked with the same client two days in a row, and her rounds had her covering practically half of downtown, but I knew the areas she frequented the most, so I started there. There was hardly anyone awake at first, except for the usual crowd. Patrolmen, vagrants, working women. Nobody who could tell me anything about Miriam. And then that fire got started, and all hell broke loose. I scrambled around for hours through the crowds, hoping to catch sight of Miriam. That was when I caught wind of a conversation as I passed by a couple of animals talking about some other crime scene, something nearby to do with a dead girl. They didn't know who she was, or what had happened, and I'm sure you all have to deal with dead folks all the time, but I got that awful goddamned feeling in my head again. It made my fur stand on end. It made me feel like I had to puke, even though I haven't put anything in my stomach since yesterday, save for that glass of water the rabbit brought me."

"My name is Jay, Mr. Barker." Though Jay was plenty used to animals referring to him simply as "rabbit," Jay made sure to add a twinge of irritation to his words. "Which is what I told you when you agreed to come speak with us today. Seeing that I'm one of the animals that is working to mete out justice for the crime committed upon _your _family, you would do well to remember my name."

To Jay's surprise, Nathaniel seemed genuinely remorseful when he answered, "You're right. Sorry. Jay, then. Thanks for the water. Anyways, that's everything there is to tell. I was worried something awful might have happened to Miriam in the night, and God help me, I was right." Nathaniel breathed in, slowly, raggedly. Then he exhaled. "Can I ask you something? I think I've answered enough questions to deserve one of my own." Jay and George exchanged glances before George waved a paw at the fox.

"Of course, Mr. Barker. I was just thinking we ought to wrap this interview up for now. Feel free to ask me and Mr. Lightfoot here anything before Officer Bailey sees you out. Within reason, of course."

Nathaniel took more time to consider what he said next. Given the circumstances, Nathaniel had demonstrated an incredible amount of composure while discussing the events leading up to his own sister's murder. It would have been easy to see this lack of overflowing grief as suspect, had Jay not been able to tell how hard the fox had been working to stifle his obvious pain since the moment he first laid eyes on what remained of Miriam Rosewood.

"Miriam is dead," Nathaniel said. "She was _murdered_." He hung on the word "murdered," like it was a jagged piece of bone that had gotten caught in his throat. "And yeah, I get it, our family history is strange, and I know for a fact you cops have made quite the industry out of locking predators like me up on account of all our awful, terrible crimes, many of which I'm sure we're actually guilty for. I don't really blame you for doing your due diligence questioning me like this. What else do you possibly have to go on? If I were in your position, I'd probably do the same thing." At this, Nathaniel fully let go of any stoic pretense. His green eyes were now streaked with red. Angry tears streaked through the fur on his face. "The thing is…she _suffered. _I wasn't able to…to see everything that was done, but I can venture to guess well enough. Miriam wasn't just killed by some mugger looking to run off with a paw full of cash. This wasn't simply the work of some gutter-crawling coward that was looking to get his kicks hurting innocent women. Whoever the bastard is that did this…they watched my sister die with _glee_. I just know it." Nathaniel was trembling with grief and rage, now.

"This wasn't just some savage animal getting their claws into whatever prey they could find. They took…pleasure in the things they did to her. In the things that they _took_. I thought I'd seen the worst Zootopia had to offer a thousand times over before today, but now…" Nathaniel looked from George, to Jay, and then back again, and Jay could hardly bear to look at the fox, such was the oppressive and stifling weight of his grief. In that instance, despite every ounce of intellect and instinct that screamed at him in the contrary, Jay realized he was now certain that Nathaniel Barker was innocent. He may yet have secrets worth uncovering, but he was no murderer.

"What I want to know," Nathaniel said, "Is how _anyone_ could be so monstrous? So _cruel_? I want to know how either of you can possibly look at animals like me, or any one of us in this godforsaken city, and try to determine which one of us might possibly be capable of doing what was done to my sister? How can you sit there, knowing that something like this can happen in Zootopia, without the very notion driving you completely mad?"

To that, neither Jay nor George had any answer to give. They just sat in silence, while Nathaniel could do nothing more but sigh one final time and whisper, "That's what I thought. That's exactly what I thought…"

**5.**

Fifteen minutes later, Jay stood on the front steps of the library with George, the two of them watching the final embers of the ZPF Headquarters fire smolder out in a thick fog of smog and ash. George was presently stuffing tobacco into his favorite ivory pipe. Neither of them had said much in the time since they left Nathaniel to be processed and sent home by Officer Bailey.

When George finally packed his pipe full enough and began to fidget for the matchbook in his breast pocket, Jay snorted a droll laugh and said, "One would think you'd had enough of that stink to fill your lungs for one day." George sucked on his pipe with obvious pleasure, exhaling with a long, rumbling purr that Jay knew meant the bear was in a thoughtful mood. He allowed his friend another few puffs before continuing his line of discussion from where they had left off before. "What do you make of all this, George? I know you asked for my help precisely because you _couldn't_ make anything of it, but it's just…well, Nathaniel was right I think. It's bloody monstrous is what it is. And you've seen something like it already, haven't you?" George indulged in one final draw of smoke before answering.

"Not _exactly_ like it, but similar enough that I didn't have to think twice to seek you out. It was five days ago – no, six. My God, I feel like haven't slept in ages. Yes, six days ago. It was a wolf then, killed not too far from where we found Miriam. She was bled out just the same, too, though she wasn't…_gutted_ like we saw today. That was new. The thing that caught my eye, though, were those damned markings painted on the wall. I don't know about Latin or any of that academic stuff, you know that well enough, but those, what do you call them? Those pictograms—"

"Hieroglyphs," Jay interjected. "Or maybe cuneiform; it's honestly hard to say without reference materials at hand. I didn't recognize the symbols from any of my admittedly amateurish experience with ancient cultures and writings, but that's what sprang to mind originally. Like something you'd find on some ancient sarcophagus." George chuckled, offering the first honest, if weary, smile Jay had seen from him in…well, it would have been years, at this point.

"Sure, Jay. That sounds right enough. In any case, those were the first things that stuck out to me when we got to Miriam this morning, if you'd believe it. I've seen enough dead girls by this point that I'm sorry to say that I'm almost getting numb to it, even with something as awful as what happened to that deer. It's a vicious world we live in, and getting worse by the day, I think. But those, er, _hieroglyphs?_ I'd only ever seen those once before, and it was on the body of that dead wolf. The first time around, I'd almost mistaken it for some kind of, I don't know, gang symbol or something. A couple of small nicks and lines underneath a circular shape. The circle part had a slit down the middle, too; it looked like—"

"Like an eye, held up by a claw…" Jay finished. "You saw the same symbol smeared up on that brick wall by the body today. Then you came to me."

"Yes," George said. He'd already managed to finish off the entire wad of tobacco he'd just packed, and was tapping the ashes out on the library's stone steps. "I asked Bailey to be _thorough_ in his debriefing with the fox. He'll likely be held up for another hour or so, provided Mr. Barker is cooperative, and he seems like the type. That ought to give you enough of a head start."

_There it is_, Jay thought. _There's the catch I've been waiting for. It wouldn't be enough just to ask after my academic expertise, would it? _He thought about pretending to be shocked, but this was too grave a situation to waste time with social niceties. "You want me to search Nathaniel's apartment," he said, not as a question, but a confirmation.

"Right again, my friend." That weary smile George had been wearing seemed positively exhausted now. There was no way Jay was going to say no, no matter how much he wanted to. "With things as chaotic as they are, there's no way we would be able to secure a warrant before the fox got home, and we're running perilously short on time. You remember, Jay, how quickly these kinds of situations can escalate. Maybe a week passes before the first kill and the second. Then a few days. Then just one. Every minute we waste is putting some poor creature's life at risk." Jay couldn't well argue with that logic. "Besides…" George paused, and that thoughtful rumble in his throat returned.

"You don't think he did it either, do you?" Jay guessed.

"No…no, I don't. I'm having Burns rummage through the records we have access to right now, and even though it'll take some time, I have no doubt that most of the fox's story is going to check out. He's hiding _something_, that much is obvious, and I doubt his cooperative mood would extend to letting the ZPF get their noses into his and his dead kin's belongings without due process. Even if he's lying to us, though, I don't think he's a killer. Or if he _is_, I suspect he isn't the kind of killer that could do that to his own family, or his lover, or whatever Miriam really was to him." Yes, Jay had considered that possibility as well. The adoption story was almost too farfetched to be _untrue_, but it would also make for perfect cover story in case other animals started asking questions. Predator/prey cohabitation was still technically illegal, not to mention being quite taboo. If such a convoluted cover story was what Nathaniel and Miriam needed to mask some kind of illicit affair, it could explain why Nathaniel was reticent to share the whole truth with the likes of the ZPF. "Still," George continued, "if we can get some kind of head start on finding the common thread between this girl, the wolf from last week, and those damned symbols, it will save lives in the long run. I'm not asking you to break in to the place or anything, but I'm sure you can beat him to the punch and ask him to show you around himself. You know, work that rabbit charm of yours."

"Ah yes," Jay laughed, "Because I am known throughout town for my immeasurable talents in social subterfuge."

"Because you're not ZPF," George said bluntly. "You're technically just a private citizen, seeking out the truth. Offer your services as a private investigator, if you have to. Then, come back to me with everything you've learned, and we'll see what we can possibly make out of this mess…"

Jay pretended to consider his options. "Fine," he said. "I'll do what I can." A thought occurred to him, almost out of nowhere. "Do you think he knows? About Miriam's…line of work?"

"What, do you mean the fact that the witching hours are an awfully _inconvenient_ time for a maid to do most of her laundering? It's hard to say. The fella seems straight-laced enough, for a fox. Maybe he just never asked questions about exactly what kind of services Miriam was providing for her downtown clientele. Or maybe he _did _ask, and he didn't like what she had to say. When he's done sifting through the paperwork, I'll have Burns ask around the other who work the rounds in that area about if they knew a doe named Miriam. Who knows? Maybe she was a colleague of theirs." George slid his pipe back into his coat pocket and tipped his hat to Jay before turning back up the steps. "I'll leave you to it then, Jay," he said. "I've got another dozen fires to put out, of the metaphorical kind. Keep me informed."

"I will," Jay said. He stood there by himself awhile longer, contemplating the last plumes of the dying blaze, trying to gather what thoughts he could in the few moments he had before setting out again. When George had shown up on Carding Street, Jay had been apprehensive on account of their partnership ending in less than desirable terms. He was surprised, or at least he told himself that he was surprised, at how quickly the two had slid back into their old rapport. He would never admit it to the bear's face, but Jay was excited to be working a proper investigation again, though he wished the circumstances weren't quite so macabre as they turned out to be. Still, endless months of working out messy affairs and bitter property disputes had taken their toll on his passion for the work, has caused him to long for the days when he was the one trapped in the library stacks, poring through dusty old tomes within nothing but the dust motes to keep him company. This, though, wasn't just real investigative work; it was the closest thing to the thrill of the hunt Jay Lightfoot was ever going to experience.

There was fear there, too, at what manner of secrets lay waiting to be uncovered this time. Nobody in Zootopia knew of the kinds of creatures that lurked in the shadows of so many of the animals that walked its streets, of the sad, bloody tales carved into the underside of the grand myth that the city had become. Jay had begun to suspect that this particular tale was going to be altogether _stranger than_ he could have ever expected just a few short hours ago. That scared him, but he had also come to accept that the fear was perhaps the part he relished the most, in the basest level of his own nature. Every rabbit lived in fear of being eaten, so what could possibly be more thrilling that going to stare down the jaws of death of one's own accord, only to outsmart it again and again?

In spite of everything, Jay found himself grinning, just a little. It was time to get moving.


	8. Second Interlude - Judy

**Second Interlude — Judy (June 21****st****, 2018 A.D.)**

_Helpless. _Just the thought of the word was enough to make Judy Hopps sick to her stomach. She had spent her entire life fighting tooth and claw against anyone or anything that ever made the mistaking of looking down on her, talking down to her, or otherwise thinking that she couldn't measure up, just because she was a dumb little bunny from out in the sticks. Yes "helpless" is exactly what she, Nick, and all of the other ZPD officers were as they stood together in dumb shock. They were packed into the cramped first-floor conference center of the Marriotter Hotel, about three miles east of the now smoldering ZPD Headquarters, which was far enough to be considered a safe-zone according to SOP, but not so distant that everyone there couldn't still hear the wail of sirens and the roar of fire-engines as they worked to contain the blaze to just the HQ.

There were a dozen of them altogether, the most "essential" personnel that Chief Bogo could gather before evacuating the rest of the staff and officers to the East Downtown Hospital. Miraculously, nobody had been killed, though several team members at the hospital were being treated for burns and lacerations, and poor Clawhauser had been stuck by a piece of debris when he dove to protect one of the civilians that had been working with at the front desk. By the time Nick and Judy arrived at the scene, the evacuation was already well underway, and Judy had to watch as Clawhauser's unconscious and unwieldy body got dragged to safety by Fangmeyer and Delgato, who had gotten pretty beat up themselves. That was when that all-too familiar knot started twisting up in Judy's gut: Her whole world falling apart around her, and the only thing she could do was stand there and watch. Now, here they all were, and nobody had anything useful to say as Chief Bogo muttered in the corner with McHorn, the burly rhino, who had arrived just moments before with word from the Mayor's office. Everyone just murmured to one another in their corners of the room.

Mayor Arborlin was busy scraping together a press conference and working with the emergency services to make sure there was no immediate danger surrounding the area, though soon she would be meeting with Bogo personally to get started on investigating each and every one of the buildings in the three surrounding blocks that had also been evacuated, just in case there were other explosives to deal with. Nobody had said the word "terrorism" yet, but it was on everyone's mind, Judy's included. The word had hardly been a part of Zootopia's lexicon until the business with Bellwether and the Night Howlers from two years back, but it was on the tip of every animal in Zootopia's tongue from then on out. "When would the next act of anti-predator terrorism occur?" barked the pundits on a reliable and regular basis. Or, for the contrarians amongst them, "What about anti-prey terrorism? Should every leaf eater in Zootopia be living in fear?" The fearmongering had finally seemed to be dying down in recent months, or so Judy wanted to believe, but this was just the spark the city needed to go into meltdown again.

This was an attack directed specifically at the ZPD, who had been working triple-time in the past two years to repair their relationship with predator and prey animal alike, and for as much as she hated it, Judy's status as "poster-rabbit" of the police force's public relations had never really went away, even after Bellwether got locked up for good. She was always being hounded by reporters and gossip bloggers whenever an officer stepped out of line with a citizen, or when a notable arrest was made, or simply when she had the gall to go about her life without inciting any more city-shaking riots.

Nick had taken to calling these particularly focused news vultures "trash-o-vores", and while he'd use the term with his usual sardonic wink in private, he had absolutely no patience with them whenever they worked up the nerve to approach Judy on the street. Once, he'd even pulled out "the Ol' Feral Face" (as Nick himself like to call it) when an obstinate badger from the _Info Army _EweTube Channel had practically shoved his camera down Judy's nose to pester her about the "one year anniversary of Zootopia's Predator Uprising Riots", which is what the nastiest trolls online had taken to calling the wave of hysteria and discrimination that Bellwether incited with her Night Howler ruse. Nick's bug-eyed, foamy-muzzled mug had been plastered all over the internet for a week, and he endured every ounce of the proceeding lunacy with a smile on his face. Judy would be grateful for that for the rest of her life.

"I think the trash-o-vores are going to have a field day with this one…" Judy whispered, quiet enough so that only Nick, who was standing right beside her, could hear. She _hated_ herself just for saying the thought out-loud, for being so petty as to make this awful tragedy about _her_, which was just the sort of thing a stupid, helpless bunny would do when they became overwhelmed with anxiety and fear. Nick understood the root of than anxiety though, and gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze, leaning in close so as not to draw attention to the way Judy couldn't stop her foot from pounding nervously in place, or the way her stupid nose kept twitching out of control.

"Listen to me, Carrots," he said (and was Judy at all surprised that she already felt more at ease, just hearing that familiar nickname?), "None of this is on you. You hear me? We have no idea what's going on here, but there's nothing you could have done to prevent it, and you sure as hell didn't cause it. Bogo is going to make sure we get to the bottom of this in no time, you'll see. And if any of those jackwagons from the trash rags try to rope you into this drama, we'll set them straight. Together."

Judy put her hand on his, squeezing it more tightly than she planned. "Okay," she said. "You're right. One step at a time. Thank you, Nick." The fox didn't say anything in response. He just squeezed her hand back.

Bogo and McHorn were no longer talking amongst themselves; each of them simply stood hunched over the long meeting desk that occupied the whole center of the room, their hooves dug deep into the polished maple wood, their brows furrowed in furious concentration. None of the other officers were taking the lead in getting a dialogue started either. So, she did what she always did when the world was conspiring to make her feel small and ineffectual: She stepped out of her station and took back as much control as she could.

"Excuse me," Judy said, stepping forward towards the Chief and perking up her ears for maximum visibility. "Chief Bogo? I can't imagine how much you have to juggle right now, and I know you were right there on the ground with us when HQ went up, but I think I speak for everyone here when I ask you just what exactly the plan is?" Judy braced herself for one of Bogo's patented verbal shakedowns – even now, as much as he'd warmed up to Nick and Judy both, the buffalo was as capable as ever at dressing an entire room down with little more than a hard stare and some carefully aimed insults. He didn't yell, or curse, or even grunt in irritation when Judy spoke up. He simply rubbed his temple with his hoof, sighed, and went on in as matter-of-fact a tone as he could muster.

"I honestly don't know, Hopps. Mayor Arborlin is positively beside herself, as you might imagine – I think she was hoping to get through her two terms without a catastrophe to clean up, but here we are. I'm working with the smaller precincts from around the city to arrange for a clean-sweep through the neighborhood, and the Fire Department's ctually working with us very diligently, for a change. The Mayor will be here any minute to meet with me, but as for the rest of you…" Bogo looked purposefully each of the animals he'd brought back from HQ, acknowledging their presence and thanking them for their service with nothing more than a barely perceptible nod. That was what Judy had come to love about the Chief; his communicative prowess swung both ways, and if he told you that he damn well expected to keep your chin up and do your job, then you did it, no questions asked. "I brought you here because I needed my best with me to deal with this…situation. But I'll be honest, everyone. This is unprecedented. It's a miracle that we got out with our hides intact like we did…"

"Except for Clawhauser." It was Wolfhard's turn to chime in. His fur had been singed, and his ears drooped down on his head. It was the most defeated Judy had ever seen the Timber Wolf look. Looking around, Judy realized that the same could be said for every animal there. Pennington, Delgato, Higgins, Grizzoli – these were the animals that Judy had come to think of as her stalwart allies and friends, officers who were as sturdy as frame of the city itself. That bomb hadn't just shaken the ZPD to its core – its very foundations had been cracked open.

"Except Clawhauser, yes." For the first time in the years she had known him, Judy thought Bogo's composure might actually break. It was an open secret around the whole of the department that Bogo and Clawhauser were closer than most anyone else in the ZPD, and everyone also knew that Clawhauser would never for a second have allowed the Chief to fret over him in the middle of a full-blown crisis. That even Bogo's steely confidence could be brought so low, and was what caused the full reality of the situation to sink in. The ZPD had been attacked. Her friends had been hurt, had very nearly been _killed_.

Right then, Judy made a promise not just to herself, and not just to the Chief, but to the whole city. The animals of Zootopia had gone through enough on her account, and they deserved to be able to live free of this kind of existential terror. That helpless sensation was beginning to twist and fester inside of her, into something sharper and altogether novel for a rabbit like her. _I'm going to find whoever did this_, she thought. _I'll _hunt_ them down if I have to, myself. _

"Clawhauser will be fine," Bogo said, finally. "He doesn't look like it, or _act _like it, but he's as tough as any of us, and he risked his life to protect a civilian, which is the oath he swore when he joined the ZPD. And if a knock on the head and a couple of scars are the worst any of us will have to show for what happened to today, then I say we got off more than a little lucky. I won't lie to you all and tell you that we have a plan, yet, but we're working overtime to get things together so we can all get our claws out of our behinds and do some damned police work. As soon as the Mayor arrives and we have our next steps in place, we'll be back on track. And that's a _promise_."

Bogo's speech wasn't enough to completely deflate the tension in the conference room, but Judy could feel every single officer there straighten up and begin to breathe easier. Even Nick, who hadn't taken his hand from Judy's shoulder in all that time, relaxed his grip.

"You see?" Nick said, "It's like I was saying, Carrots. We've got this."

Before Judy could reply, the soft atmosphere of the conference room was broken by a shrill _briiing-briing, bring-bring!_ The room literally shook as everyone, including the largest animals, started and jumped at the sound. They all looked around, puzzled, before the noticed the phone sitting on the back table at the far end of the room. It was an old, wired model, a rotary phone with the numbers you had to wheel around one-at-a-time. It didn't even have an adapter for hoofed animals or larger creatures, and that, along with the thick coat of dust smeared all across its green Bakelite casing, was a sign of how long it had been since anyone had used the thing.

"Is that the Mayor, Chief?" Nick asked, more to break the silence than anything, since the answer was obvious.

"The Mayor would never communicate with me on an unsecured line during times like these, and you could count the number of outside individuals that even _know_ we're here on a single paw." The Chief looked down at his hoofs, snorted, and added "Officer Wilde. Would you please do the honors?"

"No problem, Chief," Nick said. Judy was close enough that she could hear this hitch in his breathing, and the tiny _gulp_ that passed down his throat as he stepped towards the phone. He had been putting on his "Everything is A-Okay" routine this whole time, and Judy had thought it was mostly for her sake, but Nick was just as scared as the rest of them. He had once told her that his motto was "Never let them see that they get to you", and she had since learned how that rule applied to Nick himself, as much as anyone else.

Nick picked up the phone, winking at Judy and the others. He answered, "Hairy Hamster's Pizza —your order fast and fresh in 30 minutes or less, or the cinnamon sticks are on us! Will this be takeout or delivery?" Bogo stepped forward to snatch the phone out of Nick's claws when the fox's eyes narrowed, his tail bristled, and he curtly waved his free hand up at Bogo to halt him. Every eye and ear in the room was on Nick, now.

"Who is this?" he said, dropping his jokester tone. "I hope you understand that — _what? _Why in the hell would I do that?" A pause. Nick listened, and Judy saw that his lips were twisting up in a way they only did when he was genuinely furious, something she'd only ever seen once before in his time as her partner. Then, Nick held the receiver away from himself, covering up the mouthpiece, and spoke quietly and seriously. "They say that there's a bomb planted in an air duct in the floor just above the conference room, that it'll go off the minute anyone steps in or out of this room, and that they'll blow us up anyway unless we meet their demand." Bogo snarled and slammed his fist on the table. He only had to think for a moment, himself, before answering.

"We need to buy time, then." Bogo was seething. "Did they say what their demands were?"

Nick hesitated, his bright green eyes darting helplessly to Judy. "They, um…they want to talk to Judy, sir." Now everyone's gaze fell directly on Judy, and whatever righteous and burning fury she had mustered a moment ago spilled out of her entirely, leaving her deflated, cold, and sick to her stomach. It was a sensation she was familiar with; she had felt almost the exact same way nearly two years ago, after she botched the press conference about the missing mammals, when she watched Nick turn his back on her and walk out of her life. _Helpless_.

Nick was here, now, though she had learned to read him very well in the intervening years, and she could tell without him having to say anything exactly what was waiting for her on the other end of that phone line. Two years ago, she tried to save Zootopia, and ended up breaking it in the process. The city's wounds had been mended, or so everyone went out of their way to tell themselves, but though Officer Judy Hopps and her partner Nick Wilde had been hailed as heroes by most, Judy had spent more than one sleepless night wondering just when the other shoe was finally going to drop. When was she finally going to be brought to task for letting everyone and everything she had ever loved down so utterly and completely? As Nick handed her the phone, he whispered, almost pleaded, "Judy, no matter what this bastard says, you—"

"Don't, Nick," Judy said. "It's okay." Then she held the receiver up to her ear. "You wanted to speak to me?"

"_Yes, Officer Hopps, I did_." The voice on the other end was indistinct, likely due to some sort of machine garbling. If they had their usual resources, or if this call had been made on a cellular line, there would no doubt be some effort to trace this call. The bomber was obviously accounting for that. Without thinking, Judy slipped her free hand into one of her belt's utility pockets, and she immediately found her trusty carrot-shaped microphone pen. Judy clicked the pen open and closed repeatedly as the voice went on: "_You don't sound surprised. Were _you _expecting_ me?"

_Be calm,_ Judy thought, though her heart was pounding like a jet engine in her chest. _Keep that darn foot still. Stop twitching your nose. Even if they can't see you on the other end of the call, everyone else in this room _can_. _

"Egomaniacs with a chip on their shoulder usually like to brag," Judy answered. "You wouldn't be the first "evil mastermind" to go out of their way to explain their plan to me. So what do you want?" The voice chuckled, and Judy would have given anything in that moment to reach through the telephone and sock the owner of that hateful laugh right in the jaw.

"_Your reputation for impudence precedes you, Miss Hopps. I would have been disappointed in anything else. I will admit, though, that I am not here to give you my villainous monologue. At least, not yet._" Another laugh, and Judy could hear even through the warped transmission that it was a choking kind of laughter, rattling out of its owner's chest in violent spasms. "_I merely wanted to make a formal introduction, from one invested party to another. From predator, to prey. One of the great thrills of the hunt is to look into your quarry's eyes as they die, to _feel_ the life slip out of them. Sadly, I cannot guarantee that we will have the opportunity for such a dance, so I opted for the next best thing. If I cannot see the quake and tremble of your tiny little frame, then I can at least _hear _it, yes?_"

"If hunting me is what you're after, then you're off to a pretty lousy start, whoever you are. You hurt my friends, but you didn't even get close to scratching me. From where I stand, it's almost like you _want_ every last officer in the ZPD to come crashing down on your sorry excuse for a head."

"_Oh goodness!_"The voice's mock alarm was almost more infuriating than its stupid laugh. "_You are already living up to my expectations, Miss Hopps, and we've barely begun! And yes, that first bomb _was_ intended for you, but not to kill you. I merely wanted to send along a little message, and I paid you this call to ensure that the message came through as clear as crystal._"

"Say whatever you have to say, then!" Judy said, not intending to raise her voice as much as she did. "It doesn't matter. We'll catch you, and we'll bring you to justice, one way or the other. That's how it always goes."

"_Of course, Miss Hopps. Of course. I am very much looking forward to it. We all are. Just know this: Jack Savage sends his regards." _

_Click. _A dull tone droned in Judy's ear. The line was dead.

* * *

**A/N: **I made sure not to make the wait as long as last time! As always, I love to hear feedback of all kinds, so let me know what you thought in the comments. Stay safe and stay healthy out there, everybody.


	9. if-then-else (Pt 1)

_**A/N: **Thank you all for reading and leaving your kind comments and feedback, as always, and keep 'em coming! The next chapter will be here ASAP. Stay safe and stay healthy, everyone._

* * *

**03: if/then/else (June 21-22****nd****, 2186 A.D.)**

Nora stared unblinking at the thousands of lines of code that tumbled down the huge monitor affixed to Dallis' workstation. The three of them had been working in the laboratory in the basement depths of ZPD Precinct Zone D-19 for hours, ever since Chief Dasher had escorted Juno Mori away to be debriefed, which meant that Nora had spent the time running diagnostics and installing firmware upgrades with Dallis while Brody snored on the cot in the corner. The wolf often spoke of his naps in a reverential tone, even when Chief Dasher was in earshot, and Nora and Dallis knew better than to even attempt interrupting him. That Chief Dasher was willing to accommodate an hour or two of snoozing on the job was a sure enough sign as any that Brody's technical acumen was worth indulging his lazier habits.

Earlier that night (Morning? It was definitely morning now, wasn't it?), Nora asked Dallis if Brody was like this at home, too, and the pig just snorted and said, "Are you kidding me? He's like a pup hopped up on his first cappuccino — he'll be up all night tinkering, or scouring message boards, or God knows what else. Sometimes I think the _only_ sleep he gets is on that silly old cot back there. The idiot…" Dallis' voice was gruff, but Nora could hear the warmth underneath it, and it made her glad that the pig was willing to pull yet another 24-hr shift with her to wrap up all the technical rundowns that her fancy new field operations suit required. Before today's mission had even started, Brody was emphatic that the suit's biometric response data needed to be gathered and scanned as soon as the operation was finished, and though the process apparently took an eternity to complete, Nora figured it was the least she could do before heading up for her own debriefing with Dasher. Dallis and Brody had built the ARCTIS (short for Assault/Recon CoverT Infiltration System) specifically for Nora, and the thing had saved her hide in the fight against those crazy corporate ninjas. Though Nora planned on continuing to make fun of both of her colleagues for their insistence on giving the suit an acronym worthy of a cheesy spy flick, if Brody wanted data when he woke up, then data he would receive.

Now, after taking a mercifully long shower and changing into her favorite set of beat up old workout sweats, Nora sat in Brody's vacant chair, sipping a mug of hot blueberry lavender tea while she gazed up at the almost incomprehensible jumble of numbers and symbols on the screen, stroking her tail in her lap absentmindedly. Dallis muttered to himself while he tinkered at the metal workbench that was affixed to his computer station. The ARCTIS was hooked up to the tangle of wires that ran from the bench's panels to the computer. Neither of them had said much for a long time.

Nora had mixed in some Amp! Powder into her tea to stave off her exhaustion, though she was realizing that it was probably a mistake to settle her tired eyes on Dallis' monitor. Though she was far from a tech expert, Nora had always taken comfort in the drip-feed puzzle logic of screens like this. The waves of code and dancing executable windows had such a hypnotic rhythm as they cascaded down the screen that she may as well have been sitting in front of one of those old fashioned mentalists that she'd seen so many often in old movies, the kind that would swing a pocket watch from a chain that dangled in his claws.

Her father, ever the technophobe, had once equated computer systems to nothing more than a crude copy of animal instinct, all automatic function and single-minded purpose. He trusted them to supplement policework, but never to replace a good officer on the field. "A machine can sniff out a trail of evidence," he once instructed her, "and it can cross-reference however many thousands of databases we've got archived on every single animal in the city. But what a computer can _never_ do is look another creature in the eyes and understand them. Know them. That single instant of knowing, _beta_, can make all the difference…"

Nora had come to agree, in a sense, though even she had to admit getting excited by the pure _possibility _that all of this glittering technology could provide. These days in Zootopia, anyone really could be _anything_. Hate the color of your fur? Change it into a new, vibrant, hitherto unknown hue, whenever you want. Ever wanted the eyes of a lion, even though you're stuck in the body of a gazelle? Companies like Ursa-Corp and FringeTech could make it happen. Can't live without being connected to Z-Net? Neural implants weren't exactly _legal_ at this point, but everyone knew they were done, and it was only just a matter of time before they officially went white-market.

Nora's modifications were limited to the purely functional. An ocular chip inside of her left eye allowed her access to classified ZPD op-sites and evidence. A ZPD modified In/DEX ID stitched into the pack of her right palm allowed her to interface with both her professional and personal DEX Readers, a necessity for nearly every modern Zootopian. Beyond that there was the single set joint and muscle augs in that ran down the bones and muscles of her left leg. Those were installed when she was eighteen, to compensate for the damage done by a particularly nasty fall she took one evening when — and this was an irony neither her father nor Nora herself would ever let go of — she jumped onto a moving sky-barge from six stories up, trying to outrun the cops. A night out at a club she frequented went south. Nora got caught up in the middle of a bust; it was a total misunderstanding.

At least, that's what she swore up and down to her father, and he either believed her straight out, or he spent the last ten years _pretending_ to believe her. Suddenly, while her eyes settled in on the flickering lines of code on Dallis' monitor, Nora's other senses were flooded with the memories of that night just a couple of weeks before her nineteenth birthday, and they got tangled and dragged even further to the surface with the experience at Ursa-Corp tower she was still trying to shake off. This happened sometimes, this surge of sense memory that was less a flashback and more a recompiling of smells, sounds, and sensations that were woven into her own personal code:

The spine-tingling thud of electronic music.

The shattering of glass, and the sizzling _hiss _of burning metal.

The stink of hot breath and pheromones mixed with sticky-sweet tang of alcohol and every brand of cheap cologne and perfume imaginable, all twisted together into a sensual slurry.

The ozone tinge left by the strange-weapon's ray as it coursed through the air and blasted holes into office equipment.

Strangers' tails brushing up and tangling with Nora's in step to the beat.

The strike of her fist against brute muscle and bone.

A vial passed from one paw to hers, along with a secret Nora no longer remembered.

A name, spoken softly, but without a trace of hesitation: _My name is Juno Mori_.

"Thinking about your rabbit friend?" Dallis asked. Nora snapped out of her not-quite-a-trance with a start, and only then did she realize how hard she was gripping her tail.

"And what exactly gives you that idea, Dallis?"

The pig chuckled gruffly. He had moved from the ARCTIS to the mysterious ray gun; the outer panel had been removed, and Dallis was enthusiastically prodding at the interior components. Nora had half a mind to ask whether it was a good idea to be so blithely poking at the thing that had nearly blown her into pieces not three hours ago. "You're really going to tell me that you aren't just as curious as me what the Chief had to say to her? In a night filled with unknown variables, that little bunny was the must unknown and variable of them all."

Nora stood to stretch and yawn before joining Dallis at his workbench and inspecting his handiwork. "Are including this space gun in that assessment, pig? Because as near as I can recall, the rabbit didn't nearly burn a hole through my head the size of your hoof."

"What, _this_ silly gizmo?" Dallis scoffed. "We'll know more when ol' sleepy paws over there has gotten enough of his precious beauty sleep to run a full diagnostic on it, but this isn't anything special. The theory and mechanics for this kind of weaponry have been leaking out all over the darker corners of Z-Net for years know — it was inevitable that one of these corporations would get their greasy paws on the plans and make an actual prototype. Practical lethality aside, this gun is little more than a cosplay prop." This of course meant that Dallis was extremely interested in the thing, as he only reserved this kind of curt dismissal for the things that both irritated _and_ impressed him. You only had to look at how he spoke to and about Brody to know that.

"Oh sure," Nora said, picking up the gun and turning it over to examine its innards herself. "Don't let that pesky _lethality_ get in the way. I'm sure Dasher is going to love such a thorough and well-reasoned three sentence report!" Granted, she couldn't make heads or tails of it herself. The inside of the gun was a foreign array of wires and ominous looking lights that resembled no modern weaponry Nora had ever seen, and she had her fair share of hands on experience. Looking at it in the cold and sterile light of the lab, Nora even had to admit that it _did_ look like some over-designed movie prop, just one that happened to match its cheesy science-fiction form with deadly function.

Dallis shrugged, and casually tossed the gun back onto his metal workstation, where it landed with a sharp _thunk_. Nora flinched, imagining in vivid detail how much trouble the three of them would be in should the blaster misfire one of its rays right at hundreds-of-thousands of dollars' worth of proprietary ZPD research and development materials.

"We prepped for this operation for two weeks, Nora," Dallis explained, using that casually condescending tone of his that Nora found parts endearing and infuriating. "Ursa-Corp suspects an imminent act of _aggressive_ corporate espionage, and so we plan on the usual criminal elements: Cyber-warfare, blackhat agents, and even possible conflict with on-site mercenary units — hence the ARCTIS." Dallis was clacking his hooves together thoughtfully the way he did when he was gearing up to make a dramatic point. Nora indulged him, knowing that it would be easier just to let him work off all of his pent-up energy.

"If you factor out the presence of this laser thing," the pig continued, "Everything that happened tonight was more or less within acceptable parameters."

"Including the part where I let the crazier of the two white-collar ninjas escape into the night with a hard-drive full of the exact IP we were supposed to _prevent_ the theft of?" Nora was leaning against the workbench now, clacking her claws against the metal impatiently.

"Of course," Dallis said. "You may be very good with the flipping and the punching and whatnot, but you're not a superhero, Nora, and you're certainly not _perfect_. Missions with you rarely go perfectly, that's just a well-known fact that Brody and I have—" The stern glare that Nora shot Dallis must have been icier than Nora intended, because Dallis paused and actually softened his typically droll tone when he continued. "I meant that as a compliment, you know. Brody and I _like_ working ops with you more than anyone else _because_ you rarely let the job get in the way of, well, doing your job! A more cautious cop might have let both of those mercs get away with the IP tonight while they waited for backup, and a greenhorn probably would have gotten that rabbit killed, not to mention themselves. The Chief will tear you a new one over it, sure, because you broke the rules, violated SOP, and all that stuff. She's still going to keep you on the case, though, and we both know why. It's because, no matter how much all good sense and reason would suggest otherwise, you aren't going to rest until the job is done. It's a "lose the battle, win the war" sort of thing."

Nora didn't respond to Dallis' attempt at a pep-talk, but if it wasn't _exactly_ what she needed to hear at the moment, it was close enough to count between friends. Instead, she dug through one of the pockets in her sweatpants and fished out the note she'd received from Juno Mori.

"So, what's the grand point you wanted to make, Dallis?" she asked. "That I obviously ought to follow up on this lead, since that's the first thing any idiot fresh out of Academy would do?"

Dallis crossed his stubby arms. "Officer Khatri, I'm hardly such a simple pig as that. It's because it's exactly what a rookie _wouldn't _do. Don't forget, the ARCTIS stores backup audio recordings of everything that happens from the moment you put on the suit to the moment it comes off, and I've spent the last few hours reviewing everything while I worked. Whoever this rabbit is, she's sticking her ears into the middle of 'Important Corporate Business'—" (Dallis made sure to emphasize that last part by making very sarcastic air-quotes with his hooves) "—and you know as well as I do that, no matter what the Chief might be working towards otherwise, companies like UrsaTech and the rest look at us as rent-a-cops. On _their_ payroll, as it were. Juno, though, is digging up dirt as a free agent; she's a stick that's throwing herself into the cogs of the machine. An Academy grad nowadays would know full well that the last thing Ursa-Corp would want is a girl like you to actually follow-up on that lead, because you might actually _find _something."

Nora understood this, too, though she could hardly begin to imagine where such threads could possibly lead her. _Nowhere good, for starters,_ she thought. Juno had spoken of disappearing citizens and silenced dissenters, of a system that was churning up and spitting out anyone that inconvenienced Powers That Be, and of course it wasn't the first Nora had heard of such rumors. The Corporate Citizenry Act wasn't the first step in the conglomerates efforts to stick their paws into every aspect of Zootopian life; it was merely the most drastic. When the law finally passed, it was basically taken as a formality that legally recognized what was already practically true. That kind of power always came with a cost. Nora had always believed that officers like herself were one of the only institutions that could help to balance that cost, but now…

"…_it __can__ be better_." That was what Juno had written to Nora in her note. And also: _"Find me at the March Hare."_ Nora read the paper over again, smiling at the portentous nature of the whole situation. Juno might as well have offered Nora the choice between a red pill or a blue one, though that may have been _too_ on the nose.

"That little rabbit sure is confident that she won't be asked to stick around to answer more questions…" Nora said.

"It's a good thing she just got released fifteen minutes ago then," Dallis said.

"What? How in the hell would you even—" Before Nora could finish asking, she had the answer, as the ARCTIS diagnostics had transitioned to a decidedly non-sanctioned piggy-back feed of Chief Dasher's own desktop. Dallis went ahead and explained himself anyway, not wanting to waste the dramatic reveal he'd set up for himself.

"What? Brody and I are technically the head of the entire Department's IT services, so it isn't like actively monitoring literally every computer in the precinct is difficult. Besides, we're working this case too, so I figure we have a right to know." Nora eyed Dallis skeptically. "I know what you're thinking," Dallis grumbled, "and this is a For-Emergencies-Only measurement that I would never _dream_ of abusing. And even if I _did _know about all of the office hours you've spent marathoning those old flatvids you love so much, it isn't like I'd rat you out to Dasher."

Nora rolled her eyes. "We're going to have a very important conversation about personal privacy when all of this is done," she said, going through the motions of at least pretending that she felt bad watching Dallis flick through the freshly outlined reports that Dasher was just now wrapping up on. Her guilt was assuaged when she caught a glimpse of the document labeled "N. KHATRI FIELD EVAL: ASGN 0XD19-UC62186" — the designation number for this evening's operation. Though she was a curt cheetah in person, Chief Dasher was somewhat notorious for her verbosity when it came to written reports, as she often devoted pages of exhaustively descriptive details to scrutinizing the most routine of traffic stops.

Nora had neither the time nor the stomach to review everything Dasher had to say about her conduct during the Tower Incident, which is what the Chief had so helpfully and ominously labeled it, but she caught a few informative morsels before quickly motioning to insist that Dallis move on to something else_: __"Predictably reckless, bordering on insubordinate." "Clinically incapable of solving a problem without setting fire to something expensive." "Masks her professional insecurities with incredibly unprofessional and ridiculous 'humorous' banter that distracts operatives from mission critical tasks." "Continues to violate dress-code with gleeful abandon."_ Most of that was likely copy-pasted from previous files, and Nora would not be shocked if she heard most of it again verbatim when the Chief inevitably dressed her down in debriefing, but the scare quotes around the word "humorous" stung a little. Her unprofessional and ridiculous workplace banter was hilarious, and she took great pride in it.

"What about Juno?" Nora asked. Dallis tabbed in and out of multiple windows before finding the page labeled "AOI PRIV. DEBRIEF & ASSESMENT: JUNO MORI". Dallis and Nora were both taken aback by the contents of the page at first, each of them glancing puzzled at the other.

"Where's the rest of it?" Nora asked.

"This _is_ it," Dallis said. "It seems finished, too." That couldn't be right. Chief Artemis Lucille Dasher of the Zootopian Police Department Zone D-19 would never had suffered such a measly report to live. It was barely three paragraphs long. Nora had not two days ago read a precinct memo from the cheetah about the necessity of contributing to the communal supply of coffee pods that ran for _two pages_. In full, the entirety of the report read:

ANIMAL OF INTEREST IN TOWER INCIDENT CASE

NAME: JUNO MORI

SPECIES: HARLEQUIN RABBIT

GENDER: F

AGE: 27

DOB: 02.24.2159

In/DEX ID: N/A

CIVILLIAN J. MORI WAS PRESENT DURING OFFIVER KHATRI'S UNEXPECTED CONFRONTATION WITH MERCENARY AGENTS AT URSA-CORP TOWER INVESTIGATION. THOUGH UNARMED, MORI'S INTERVENTION WAS CRITICAL IN APPREHENSION OF ONE (1) OF THE TWO SUSPECTS, WHOSE IDENITY AND MOTIVES ARE STILL BEING PROCESSED.

J. MORI IS NOT A CURRENT OR PAST EMPLOYEE OF URSA-CORP RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, LLC. HER PRESENCE AT UC-TOWER A RESULT OF WHAT SHE IS REFERRING TO AS "PERFECTLY LEGAL INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM." SHE POSSESSES A SIGNED LETTER FROM THE COMPANY'S CHIEF OF CHIEF RESEARCH ACQUISITIONS OFFICER THAT EXPRESSES CONSENT TO ACCESS UPPER FLOORS PER CONDITIONS OF ACCOMPANIED TOUR. J MORI CLAIMS THAT HER PRESENCE IN BUILDING AFTER-HOURS THE RESULT OF A "SCHEDULING MISCOMMUNICATION."

VERACITY OF LETTER AND OFFICIAL COMMUNICATIONS, AS WELL AS POSSIBILITY OF LEGAL ACTION (UP TO AND INCLUDING ARREST) REGARDING J. MORI, IS CURRENTLY PENDING VIA SPECIAL URSA-CORP INVESTIGATIVE BRANCH.

COMPANY ACTION REPORT ID: 42

Nora had time to read the whole thing three times over before Dallis put voice to the questions they both were puzzling through. "What the hell is a 'Company Action Report ID', or an 'Ursa-Corp Investigative Branch'? And how on earth does this Juno Mori _not_ have an In/DEX ID? You can't even restock on breath mints these days without it getting logged on your In/DEX, much less get paid, or purchase stimplants, or _anything_. Nora, who is this girl?"

Nora couldn't answer anything about Juno, though she _did_ have an inkling about Ursa-Corp' meddling in the investigation. The company's affairs had become more and more formally intermingled with the ZPD's over the years, and though they had never gone so far as to officially participate in any police procedures as an enforcement agency, there had long been _rumors_, but nothing concrete.

Nora shook her head. She was too tired and too overwhelmed to consider the implications of Ursa-Corp having a direct information and influence feed on the proceedings of an active investigation, much less one in which they held such a personal stake. That would have to come later. For now, Nora was concerned with Juno. There was clearly more to her story than what the Chief's meager report let on, and it was becoming more obvious by the second that there_ had_ to be some kind of link between whatever Juno was doing at Ursa-Corp Tower, and the intellectual property that those two ninja _whatevers_ were so hell-bent on stealing. Nora knew that there was little to do about finding the runaway cat other than wait for Brody's TechTrace system to pull up something from the data feeds around the city. As for Juno Mori, however…

Nora turned to Dallis, the buzz of the chase perking up her ears and tail even has every muscle in her body ached from exhaustion. "You're sure you've never seen anything like this in the Chief's reports before?" she asked. "Think hard, Dallis."

"I was being serious when I said that this is an Emergencies-Only feature. Brody and I have only ever had to use it to run remote tech support, honest. And to dig up dirt on you for future use."

"Still…there's something off about this whole thing. It's all so obvious, but none of it makes any sense when you put the pieces together…at least not yet. That ridiculous gun, that nonsense report from Dasher, Mori — for a night where absolutely nothing went right, everything is too…"

"Too quiet," Dallis said. "Too clean."

"Yes," Nora nodded. "Even with that crazy cat running around out there, it's like the whole operation is running in slow motion. Dasher would never just let an asset like Juno go like that, unless…"

"I have some theories of my own," Dallis said, "But you're right. The Chief's up to something. So is Ursa-Corp. Whether or not it's the _same_ something, I don't know, but we've got a chance to get ahead of this thing, for once. I say we take it."

"What do you have in mind?" Nora asked.

"This is, what, your thirtieth hour on shift? Even if that stimulant power crap could keep you going for any longer, you're legally mandated your recovery shift, right?"

"Twelve hours, minimum," Nora confirmed. She was beginning to get a grasp on Dallis' plan.

"You usually take those sleep-shifts down here, anyways. What if you used those hours to slip out of here and do a little investigating on your own, before the Chief or any of Ursa-Corp's eyes can slow you down with all of the usual red tape? Brody and I can monitor the work everyone else here is doing in the meantime, and make sure you're in the loop."

Nora considered it. "I won't have long before I have to physically report back in. Ten hours tops. Assuming I can even find what this "March Hare" is, it'll be cutting things _very_ close, and if the Chief wasn't already pissed…"

"I've already taken care of the hard part." Nora and Dallis turned around to find Brody standing there, awake, mug of tea cradled in his paws, wrapped in his favorite blanket with his fur still all mussed from sleep. "I had TechTrace run a cross-reference with your note before I passed out," he said, yawning so wide that Nora could have counted every one of the glistening teeth in his jaws. "There was an abandoned small-animals clothing store from back in the bib-box days that seemed like a bad match, and a very operational hostess club that felt…er…well, it didn't seem like the best bet either. It took longer than expected, actually, but T-Trace came through as usual." The wolf handed Nora a crisp printout of a very dour looking photograph. She had been expecting something less-glitzy than one of the mega-blog offices that took up 99% of the internet news traffic, but the building in question didn't look like an office at all.

The building in the picture looked almost certainly like it was from one of the Zootopia's asphalt slums. Those were the oldest and poorest neighborhoods in the city, the ones that had been denied the investments, technologies, and infrastructure that allowed the rest of the city's creatures to literally fly headlong into the world of the 22nd century. Aircars were prohibited there, only one train ran through the slum networks with any regularity, and most of the animals struggled with only the most barely functional of Z-Net connections to get them by. When Nora saw that Juno didn't have an In/DEX ID, she had figured it to be some kind of error, or another variable in the conspiracy equation. She never once considered that Juno might simply be one of the animals in Zootopia who _couldn't_ have an In/DEX ID.

"So The March Hare is…what?" Nora asked. "A one-rabbit operation from out in the slums?"

"It looks like it," Brody said, barely able to repress the obvious pity and morbid curiosity he had for the kind of rabbit that could live tethered to the analogue world. "According to what little I was able to find on Z-Net, it's a _print_ publication. So if anyone at all is reading what Juno is writing, they're doing it offline."

That made everything make _less_ sense, if such a thing was possible. Nora's first instinct was that Ursa-Corp wanted to shut Nora up because her reporting could unearth some scandalous company secret, but if she was working a literal rag that was only being read by the exact 10 percent of Zootopia's population that barely registered in the public consciousness to begin with, then why on earth would the company be sticking it's claws in ZPD affairs to keep tabs on her?

_Now I _have _to know what you're about, Miss Mori_, she thought. _Please don't make me regret not arresting you…_

There were a dozen things to prepare for her quasi-legal jaunt to the slums, and a hundred more questions buzzing through Nora's mind besides, but before she could think about any one of them, the next step in the investigation was clear.

"Brody. Dallis," she said, brushing past her friends and shuffling towards the now-vacant couch. "Thank you. I don't know why you two keep sticking your scruff out for me after all I put you through."

"It's the only thing that keeps me dying from boredom," Brody said, with matter-of-fact affection.

"As the one scruff-less member of this trio," Dallis said, "I take it upon myself to prevent either my partner _or_ my best friend from getting all three of us fired. Or worse. Besides, I'll never resist an opportunity to knock these 'Corporate Citizens' down a peg or three."

Nora collapsed onto Brody's couch. It was warm, and smelled strongly of stale coffee and stray wolf fur. It was very comfortable.

"Keep tabs on things for me," Nora said. "I'll head out to the March Hare at exactly 0800. That gives me two hours to sleep. Set an alarm for me, would you?" Either Brody or Dallis responded, but Nora didn't register it. She was asleep within seconds of her head hitting the cushion.


	10. if-then-else (Pt 2)

**A/N: **Hello all, and thank you again for reading. 's limited formatting issues made this chapter very difficult to get right. For the best reading experience, I highly recommend reading the story using the "Full" story-width setting. If you wish, you can find the "most correct" version of the story on Ao3.

* * *

**2.**

_The rabbit has soft grey fur, and violet eyes.__This is not Juno. Nora understands this._

_Though she _does_ know this rabbit, whose eyes are shimmering with such apprehension. Such _fear_._

_Nora knows her the way any dreaming creature knows another. In a dream, someone simply _is_._

_Nora _knows_ her, even as the room around the two of them_

_(which is not _really_ a room,_

_but the _impression_ of one._

_A mimicry of_

_a memory of a place:_

_Retold once over and then barely half-_

_remembered) forgotten)_

_is smeared over. Like a painting left out in the rain._

Breathe. _The rabbit — the one who is not Juno — is still there. Still steady._

_Nora steps forward, and the room_

_shifts beneath her._

_shudders around her._

_tumbles over her._

_There are other animals here, she sees now. Their forms are foggy and distant. The faces…_

_She can barely make them out. And only when she casts a glance from the corner of her eye._

_Except for one: The rabbit. Her grey fur. Her violet eyes._

_Without knowing what she could possibly say, Nora calls out, but the voice is not her own._

_It's a male's voice. A stranger's voice. The _wrong_ voice. Though…_

_There it is again. That uncanny _familiarity, _shivering down her spine. He says_

("Judy—)

That is _her name. This rabbit, here. _Judy. _Her vest reads _ZPD. _Of course. She's a cop._

_It is an old design, though, the kind that officers have not worn in a hundred years._

_She is standing in front of an ancient telephone, wired, with numbers still fixed to a rotary dial._

_The receiver hangs lifeless in her paws. Nora can _almost_ understand why. There was a call…_

_The narrative is falling, not into place, but into recognizable _pieces_:_

_A fire. No — an _explosion._ A violent act._

_The phone call. Judy's face as the voice on the other end said…said what, again?_

_And this damned room they were stuck in when they really ought to be _out there. _Finding—_

_Finding _who?

_Nora opens her mouth (_his _mouth) to speak again, because Judy is staring right at her (at _him_)._

_Nora (Not Nora, but—) can feel it, the overwhelming pressure of _need_ in those eyes._

("Judy, who—)

_Nora feels sick. A sense of vertigo is clawing at her gut. She is at once herself and _not _herself._

_She looks down for the first time and sees an _almost_ familiar frame._

_But the tawny red fur on her body is not her own. Those clenched claws are not her own._

_They are _(his.)

_If she thinks hard enough, she might even be able to_ _remember _(his) _name…_

_(something sly) _

_(something quick) _

_(something sharp)_

_but then Judy speaking, her mouth is moving. Silent. She has no voice._

_Nora can hear nothing except for the rush of blood in her temples._

_Except for the soft click of her claws on the hardwood floor as she steps forward._

_And then she is_

_saying,_

_said,_

_will say,_

_words that she knows, in that dreaming way of knowing, even though they mean nothing at all:_

("Judy, who is Jack—

**3.**

_ Savage?")_

Nora woke. She was still lying on Brody and Dallis' couch, her body half submerged in the tattered leather cushions. The wolf was standing above her, wearing an expression of mild concern, along with the exact same loungewear she had seen him in before completely crashing. He was even holding the same mug, and a trail of steam was dancing lazily in the air above it. It could have been mere seconds since Nora's eyes last closed; she certainly felt just as exhausted as she had before passing out. A glance at Dallis' monitor told her that it was, in fact, 7:23. It wasn't exactly the two hours of rest she had been hoping for, but it would have to do.

Nora sat up, groggy, but functional, though barely. She shook herself with as much vigor as she could muster to try and unstick the tiredness from her eyes, not to mention her mussed and matted fur.

"Nightmares?" Brody asked.

"Why?" Nora laughed, "Was I growling in my sleep, again? Twitching my little feetsies, maybe?" She was only half-joking. For the past few weeks, Nora's dreams _had_ felt strange. More vivid than usual in one sense, though still much harder to cling too once awake . Nora was mostly aware of this in a nebulous, half-formed sense; even now, the visions and sensations that were so frighteningly _vivid_ to her just moments before were evaporating from her mind, leaving only

(_Grey fur. Violet eyes. "Judy, who is_—)

that irritatingly familiar feeling of vague unease that always arrived to fill the void of memory left behind upon waking.

Brody must have noticed the way Nora was gnawing on her lip, or how she was digging her claws into her tail a little too hard, because he didn't bother responding with one of his trademark retorts. He simply clapped her lightly on the shoulder with one hand and offered his piping hot mug with the other.

"Fresh pot of coffee," he said. "And before you ask, yes, I made sure to wash my slobber off first."

"Dallis won't mind if I pilfer some of his precious liquid treasure?" Nora asked.

"He's on the upper-levels right now, actually," Brody said. "Checking to make sure everything is clear as can be while you 'rest up' down here. As soon as he sends back the all-clear, you'll be good to go." Nora took a greedy gulp of the brew, almost regretted it as the liquid nearly scalded her throat, and then sighed in relief as the bittersweet warmth rushed down her stomach and filled her with just enough life to start making at least a couple more bad choices for the day.

Brushing off the last traces of worry left from her restless sleep, Nora stood at last. There was no way she would be able to commandeer a ZPD aircar without calling attention to herself, and such vehicles were all but useless in the one of the asphalt districts. This meant she'd need to take one of the few remaining ground-trains down to Old Savanna Central, and if it was half-past seven now, it would be almost nine o'clock in the morning by the time Nora reached her destination. Nora would have just a little over two hours to track down Juno at The March Hare and get whatever information she could before UrsaCorp started running interference.

"Time's a' wasting'," she said, cracking her knuckles and back with a luxurious stretch. Then, after catching sight of the ARCTIS sitting in its station on the lab workbench, Nora flashed Brody a mischievous grin. She could see the wolf's eyes widen with conspiratorial glee before she even asked her question.

"Is there any chance I could take the suit?"

**4\. **

Nora was almost asleep again when the steel wheels on the old Line 3 monorail squealed to a shuddering halt. She was fully awake just seconds later, when the tram doors slid open with weary _whoosh_ and _clunk! _This was followed by a staccato clattering of claws and hooves, as the morning stragglers still on board the train began making their exit. It was still early, and the only animals heading back into weary asphalt districts were the ones just getting off of the graveyard shifts. Sanitary workers, security detail, freelancers of various shapes and sizes.

_Not to mention one wayward cop who is just _begging_ to get put on lockdown_, Nora thought, though whatever chance she had to turn back at this point was long gone. Then, she would have to double-time it back to HQ. Despite Brody's optimism, the odds of her sneaking back _in_ without going unnoticed were slim-to-none; Nora had to hope that whatever intel she got would be enough of a bargaining chip to earn Chief Dasher's good graces. The finer points she would simply improvise when the needs arose.

Nora left the platform at Berry Station, being careful not to accidentally bump into any objects or random passersby. To anyone looking at her without paying too much attention, she looked like any other fox you might find in Zootopia, a little tired maybe, and dressed in a plain purple hoodie and tattered jeans; it was a getup that marked her more as an under-slept and underemployed twentysomething, rather than a ZPD Agent wearing almost two-million dollars' worth of _technically_ stolen government technology.

The illusion was even more seamless than Nora had anticipated, though Dallis and Brody had both warned that the cameras and optical fibers woven all throughout the ARCTIS were extremely sensitive to physical disturbances. A stiff breeze they could handle, but if a buffalo that didn't respect Nora's personal space happened to stumble right into her, every animal nearby would likely be wondering why the threadbare fox's hand-me-down fit suddenly transformed into a shimmering techno-suit with a very obvious  
ZPD logo emblazoned on its breast. If her low profile was blow, Nora was going to try and pass the ARCTIS off as one of the tech-rave getups that were so popular at the synthsense clubs these days, with the ZPD decals there to appeal to a clientele that harbored specific sorts of fantasies about the foxes that served them their AMPed up cocktails. It was what Dallis might have referred to as a KCP — a "Khatri Calamity Plan" — and Nora was only slightly bitter that she'd come to think of them as such herself.

This wasn't her first visit to one of the asphalt districts, though it had been years since she'd spent any time in one outside of conducting work as a ZPD officer, and even then, it there an unspoken but well-known understanding that the ground slums weren't exactly on the top of the ZPD's priority when it came to managing Zootopia's crime rate. In the past century, the city's population had nearly _tripled_, and it was not exactly short on bodies in the old days either. When an officer ever got assigned to smaller precincts in charge of these places, their colleagues half-jokingly referred to it as "R&R detail", as in "Rundown and Runout", because the only cops that got "grounded" were the ones who were either too grey-furred to keep up with the work in the hot zone of the main city, or were too much trouble to work with otherwise.

_Which is exactly where _you_'ll be headed if this jaunt of yours doesn't turn out something useful for the UrsaCorp job, _Nora thought, though it strangely rang in her head as a perfect imitation of Dallis' grumbling. Nora checked the hologram of a digital watch that the ARCTIS had so helpfully projected onto her wrist: It was 9:03 AM, which meant Nora was more or less on track with the plan. She had to give credit to those creaky old trams: They might be ugly as sin, and totally outclassed by their skyrail competitors in literally every way, but they still ran on time.

That sole factor was probably the only thing the asphalt slums had in common with the Core Districts, though. Stepping off of Berry Platform and out into the streets that ran the southeastern edge of Old Savanna Central, Nora was struck by how much it felt like walking out of a time machine and into a Zootopia from an almost forgotten past. Though some smaller, sleeker looking storefronts still managed to cling to life even in these impoverished neighborhoods, most of the buildings were still made of stone brick or even wood, and very much tarnished with age. Nora spotted graffiti all over, which in itself wasn't unusual in Zootopia; for years, the city and many businesses employed holo-graffiti artists to add a splash of vibrant personality to the sterile steel chassis of buildings in the Core Districts. Everything here was tagged with plain spray paint, though, since the newer stuff would not work on these analogue surfaces, and Nora was guessing that most of those crude and sloppy illustrations were not done on commission.

There _was_ one work that struck Nora as rather nice, though. It caught her eye as she first walked out onto Berry Street, a mural done up on the side of a rusted-out van that sat up on blocks by a small one-story shop on the corner. It was a preposterously over-the-top depiction of a scene straight from a book of fairy tales, or maybe one of the covers on those vinyl album sleeves her dad had been so fond of collecting: An armor-clad hound carrying a sleeping and/or dead fox maiden in his arms as lightning flashed ominously in the background.

Aside from one or two aircars that had been modified to function with wheels that served as more than mere glorified landing gear, almost all of the automobiles on the street were decades old. She even saw what looked like an ancient ZPD city bus that had been bought out and converted into a ride-share taxi. When Nora was just eight, her father and mother had taken her to the somewhat less intimidating old neighborhoods up north in the Meadowlands, and they'd ridden a bus all the way to the canal district without taking off into the sky even once. The novelty had delighted her to no end, back then.

Since she was trying to avoid pinging her location to anyone at HQ that were not her two best friends, Nora had to find The March Hare the old-fashioned way. On the other side of the paper that Juno had scribbled her note on, Nora had scratched out a rough shorthand of the directions Brody gave her. Her handwriting was difficult to make out even for her, a common struggle for almost everyone raised exclusively on touch screens and holographic keyboards, but was able to follow the list well enough, cutting across two marginally busy intersections and making for the northern part of town. It took twenty minutes to wind her way through the streets and alleys, but Nora eventually made her way to 3741 Coarse Wood Ave, where she found the slightly crooked apartment that apparently served as the headquarters for The March Hare. The cracked stoop and barley-colored shutters matched the building that TechTrace found, but Nora took care to stand just beyond line of sight of the windows as she planned her approach.

"ARCTIS," she whispered, "Run a thermal and acoustic scan for individuals inside. Target specs match a female Harlequin rabbit of medium height and build. Run a simultaneous scan for building security as well." The suit only took a split second to process the command and boot up its HUD, and Nora watched through the augmented reality link in her contacts as a wave spread out in front of her and shifted the world into black and silver hues, an effect that was as satisfying to behold now as it was when she first saw it months ago, when she helped Brody and Dallis develop the prototype equipment.

The ARCTIS' HUD laid out the floor plans of the building on a three-dimensional grid for Nora to assess. It was sparsely inhabited, with only a dozen or so of its units looking currently occupied between its bottom three floors, half that number filling out the top three. Based on the thermal readings and sound profiles the suit was able to gather, which were relatively limited without the aid of Dallis' drones, most of the apartments were limited to solo tenants, with a handful of couples scattered about. As was traditional in these older buildings, which lacked the structural and architectural amenities of the mega-housing blocks in the Core Districts, the larger animals lived on the bottom floors. The orange-red silhouette of an elephant paced impatiently around his cramped living room on one end of the main hall. A pair of hippopotamuses dined in what Nora assumed was their kitchen

The smaller creatures lived on the top levels, and it was on the sixth floor that Nora spotted the animal that the ARCTIS pinged as a match for the search criteria. The apartment consisted of a living area, a kitchen, a washroom, and two bedrooms, though only one was occupied by anything living. A sleeping rabbit lie curled up in a small bed, its two ears comically poking out of the too-small bed frame. Without the use of In/DEX verification and remote visual analysis, though, it was impossible to be_ certain _that the rabbit was specifically Juno Mori. The ambiguity was actually sort of exciting for Nora.

Now that she was here, with an extremely limited scope of options, she needed to come up with a real plan. The part of her that found Juno's secret note-passing schemes to be rather charming wanted to simply walk in through the front door and knock on Juno's door — Nora _had _been invited, after all. Then again, all signs pointed to the UrsaCorp case being more complicated than it initially appeared, and it already involved corporate terrorism and ninjas with laser blasters. Nora was often proud of how foolhardy she could still be, even as one of the ZPD's few bona fide capital-S Special Agents, but she was not naive enough to think UrsaCorp could not already be scouting Juno's home to keep track of her movements. The company was clearly interested in keeping tabs on her in a strictly confidential manner, and if one of the most powerful enterprises in the world did not want the police sniffing around one of their marks, that meant _something_. Nora simply had to get a lead on what exactly that was.

It would also have been a waste to take the ARCTIS out for another spin without collecting more of that precious field data Dallis and Brody were so keen on, now wouldn't it? Nora made up her mind, ducking into the nearby alleyway between 3741 and its neighboring apartment, number 3743. She snapped her fingers and waited for the suit to do its job, watching as her clothes shook and twisted in the light for a second or two before melting into the asphalt and brick of her surroundings. At night, the effect was practically seamless; the limitations of the ARCTIS' active camouflage was made plain in the broad daylight, however. It would do well-enough to trick any sensors or cameras, though Nora suspected she would run into few of them inside such a resplendent vision of crumbling progress as this. The biggest issue was that, if Nora either moved too much or stood still for too long, any civilian would be able to spot the suspiciously fox-shaped patch of light and space that didn't _quite_ fall into place with the rest of the world, like a walking mirage.

Nora examined the model of the building again and sketched out a route in her head. Working swiftly, she used a nearby dumpster to hop onto the rickety fire-escape of apartment no. 3743. Halfway up, she was able to make a small leap and climb onto the far exterior wall of Juno's building, being careful to avoid the windows of the units that were occupied on the fourth and fifth stories. On floor six, there was a living unit that seemed empty on first scan; Nora didn't want to risk using the glass cutters in the suit if she didn't have to, so she gave the window a gentle tug. It was stuck, but not locked. After a more forceful push it finally slid open with an obnoxious creak, and Nora slid quietly inside.

**5.**

The ARCTIS' scans were accurate, thankfully, and the unit just across from Juno's was vacant, and looked like it had been for some time. The were no furnishings to speak of, not even an old refrigerator unit, but scattered bits of litter and the tobacco-stained paint on the walls proved that some animal had lived there, at some point. Nora made her way to the unit's entrance, going so far as to unlock the deadbolt, when a shuffling from out in the main hall gave her pause. It was the telltale _rap-rap _of shoes against cheap carpet, getting louder as they came closer.

There were only the two units on the sixth floor of the apartment, and since nobody was calling _this_ one home-sweet-home, the only reason any other animal would have would be to make their way up this high would be to pay a certain rabbit a visit. Nora didn't recall seeing anyone heading into the building after she arrived - was this another one of the residents?

Nora activated the ARCTIS' thermal imaging again and saw the form of a hulking feline standing just inches away from her, a male lion by the looks of him. He towered at least a full foot over Nora, easily, with broad shoulders and muscles that looked alarmingly defined, even in the multi-color haze of the ARCTIS' heat scan. Curiously, there was only a thin, faint outline over his left arm, while his right arm glowed an intense bright orange.

_A prosthetic arm? _Nora placed her hand on the doorknob ever so delicately, ready to fling it open should the need arise. She briefly wondered if the cat might kick the door down outright, but he ended up knocking quite gently on it instead. From inside, Juno's thermal figure rose sleepily from the bed, quickly pulled on some clothes, and trotted out to open the door. Thanks to both her own sharp ears and the ARCTIS' built-in microphones, Nora heard Juno's conversation with the lion as clear as if she were standing right next to them.

"Hello, Caesar," Juno said with a yawn. "You're late. I fell asleep waiting for you to get here, you know?"

"My apologies," the lion responded. Caesar's voice was surprisingly soft too, and he spoke with a curling lilt that Nora could not place. "I was in the middle of some business when I received your message, and I had to see it through before I could come. It sounds as if you have some _fascinating_ new stories to tell?"

Juno laughed. "Caesar, you know full well that any good stories I have to say get put into print for all of your lovely friends to read, the same as everyone else."

"Then I will make sure to be especially thorough when I read this week's edition," Caesar said. "I take it you won't be inviting me in for a coffee this week, then? How disappointing."

"Sorry, big guy, but I just needed you to come and pick up the hard drive and the money a little earlier than expected, in case things get...hectic for me, soon. Besides, I'm sure one of your gangster pals would be a much better coffee date that me, right about now. I probably smell a little too much like dirt and burnt fur right about now for your liking." Juno's voice had the slightest twist of friendly acidity to it, and there was a subtle, silky under-growl to his voice that Nora struggled to read. He was either trying awfully hard to threaten Juno, or to seduce her. Hell, given many of the guys Nora had become acquainted with over the years, he might have been attempting both at once.

And did Juno say _gangster_? Nora did not like that one bit. The absolute last thing this case needed was to be entangled in the illicit business of one of Zootopia's crime families. _Trading data and cash with a _literal_ slum gangster? _Nora thought. _What on earth have you gotten me wrapped up in, rabbit? _

Juno vanished from the ARCTIS' view for a moment, and Caesar stood patiently outside, with Juno's door wide open in front of him. Juno hopped back into frame again, and though the suit's scans could not make out precisely what she handed over to the lion when she did, Nora figured it had to be the aforementioned tradeoff. A blinking indicator of a half-drained battery also popped onto the HUD, reminding Nora of another kink that needed working out with the ARCTIS': When separated completely from the NFC energy grids of the Core Districts, the suit's battery life was woefully limited. Nora had maybe five minutes left of active-camouflage utility, and that was only if she shut down the imaging scans.

There was not much left for Nora to see, anyway. After receiving the items from Juno, Caesar gave a very dramatic bow to Juno, which caused Nora's stomach to sink, because that made her suspect that he was either one of those annoyingly performative yoga enthusiasts, or that the "gang" he belonged to was the Yakuza (either option was terrible, as far as Nora was concerned). "Thank you," Caesar said, "and know that Mr. Tsuno extends his family's services to you, should you have need of them." _Well, _Nora thought, _That answers one question. _

The lion left without waiting for a response, and Juno slipped back inside her apartment as Caesar slowly made his way down the stairs. Nora switched the imaging off when she heard the _click_ of Juno's door sliding shut and waited another thirty seconds for Caesar to make his way far down enough. If there had been enough juice in the ARCTIS to track the lion for however long she needed to, Nora probably would have done so, but there was only so much she could do with the suit running on empty. After making certain enough that the coast was clear, she slid out of the vacant unit and into the hall.

When Nora placed her ear against Juno's door, she could hear the splattering of water against tile and glass that told her Juno had gone to wash off the grime from last night's misadventure. Turning the shower on was an easy ruse to spot for anyone that had ever bothered to watch a decent spy movie in their lives, but Nora could not afford to use the thermal imaging again. Like so many of the ne'er-do-well characters Nora had seen on film, she would just have to break into this girl's home and be fast about it.

_Assuming she isn't standing right on the other side of the door right now_, she reminded herself. _Ready to beat you over the head with a frying pan or something. _Unfortunately, this was a bolt-and-tumbler lock right out of the previous century, which rendered the ARCTIS' tools for disarming electronic-locks all but useless. Nora _did_ have enough foresight to bring along her dad's lockpicking kit, but she was hardly an expert with it. If Juno was smart enough to keep her chain-locks on, then Nora might have her work cut out for her…

When Nora took hold of the doorknob, it offered no resistance whatsoever when she turned it, and the door began to open so quickly that Nora had to stop herself from slamming it shut on reflex. _What the hell? _Could this rabbit, who had in the span of just a few hours survived a near-death experience, an interrogation from Chief Dasher, and an apparent visit from the Yakuza, truly be dumb enough to sleep and shower with an unlocked door? Except...

Except, Nora _had_ been invited here, hadn't she? _This scoop is __just for you__, _Juno had written. _Find me at the March Hare. _

Looking down, she saw Juno's doormat for the first time. It was a tattered but well-crafted custom piece, done up in maroon and gold stitching. The words "March Hare" were imprinted on the mat in elaborate cursive; in between the top "March" and the bottom "Hare," there was an even more detailed embroidering of a dandy looking rabbit, dressed to the nines, sitting on a stump and reading a newspaper.

Nora sighed and, ignoring the long held conventional wisdom that warned against girls who followed foppish rabbits into strange lands and dangerous misadventures, she opened the door and stepped into Juno's home.


End file.
